Forced to Compile from Scratch

I ran out of luck locating pre-built binaries for my dependencies. First, the autoconf-archive packages that I can locate for Ubuntu 12.04 do not have good support for Boost.Log, which I need. Second, there are no packages for yaml-cpp, which I use to parse (duh) YAML files, and I also need. And last, but this was expected, JayBeams depends on Skye.

None of these packages are really big, so I simply resigned myself to compile them from source and installing them. But that will be a drag if I want to use the Travis CI functionality for build matrices.

As I write this Travis CI is dutifully compiling the code. The first build was “successful”, but I purposefully set it up to just install all the dependencies and then run ./configure. No sense in getting more errors when I expect things to fail.

So, after some unsuccessful web searches I created a few more installation steps:

before_install:
# ... lots of stuff skipped see git repo for details ...
  - wget -q http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/autoconf-archive/autoconf-archive-2015.02.24.tar.xz
  - tar -xf autoconf-archive-2015.02.24.tar.xz
  - (cd autoconf-archive-2015.02.24 && ./configure --prefix=/usr && make && sudo make install)
  - sudo apt-get -qq -y install cmake
  - wget -q https://github.com/jbeder/yaml-cpp/archive/release-0.5.1.tar.gz
  - tar -xf release-0.5.1.tar.gz
  - (cd yaml-cpp-release-0.5.1 && mkdir build && cd build && cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr .. && make && make test && sudo make install)
  - wget -q https://github.com/coryan/Skye/releases/download/v0.2/skye-0.2.tar.gz
  - tar -xf skye-0.2.tar.gz
  - (cd skye-0.2 && CXX=g++-4.9 CC=gcc-4.9 ./configure --with-boost-libdir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ && make check && sudo make install)

The full gory details can be found in the repository.

The sheer complexity of the installation process is making it more and more tempting to try some kind of container-based solution. Simply pull the container and compile. Potentially it can get developers going faster too: install this container and develop in that environment. On the other hand, users may want to install editors, IDEs, debuggers and other tools that would not be in the container, so a lot of customization is unavoidable.

At this point I just cringe at the number of steps before_install and keep going.