Building (GNU Dico Manual)

3 Building the Package

Building Dico is quite straightforward. You run ./configure, then make, followed by make install, and you are done.

Actions the configure script performs are controlled by a set of command line options and variables. Some of these options are generic, i.e. common for all packages using the GNU autoconf system. For a detailed description of these option see the INSTALL file shipped with the sources. Yet another options are specific for Dico. We will describe them in this chapter.

3.1 Default Preprocessor

The runtime configuration system uses m4 to preprocess the configuration file (see Preprocessor), which makes the configuration extremely flexible. We recommend to use GNU m4 as a preprocessor¹. However, any other implementation of m4 can be used as well. The configure script tries to determine full file name of the preprocessor binary and the necessary command line options. In case it makes a wrong guess, you can instruct it to use a particular preprocessor by using DEFAULT_PREPROCESSOR configuration variable. For example, the following configure invocation instructs it to use /usr/local/bin/gm4:

$ ./configure DEFAULT_PREPROCESSOR="/usr/local/bin/gm4 -s"

Note the use of the -s preprocessor option. It instructs m4 to produce line directives which help dicod produce correct diagnostics about eventual configuration errors. Unless your m4 implementation does not have this feature, we recommend to always use it in DEFAULT_PREPROCESSOR value.

Finally, if you do not wish to use preprocessor at all, you can disable it using --without-preprocessor option to configure.

3.2 Default Server

Unless given an explicit dictionary server, the dico client program attempts to connect to the server ‘dict://dico.gnu.org.ua’. You may change this default by defining the DEFAULT_DICT_SERVER variable. For example, the following command line selects ‘dict.org’ as the default server:

$ ./configure DEFAULT_DICT_SERVER=dict.org

The value of the DEFAULT_DICT_SERVER variable can be either a hostname or IP address of the server. It can also be followed by a colon and a port specification, either as a decimal number or as a service name from /etc/services.

3.3 Guile Support

The GNU’s Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensions, or Guile² can be used to write database modules for GNU Dico. This requires Guile version 2.2.0 or newer. The configure script will probe for the presence of Guile on your system and automatically enable its use if its version number is high enough.

If you do not wish to use Guile, use --without-guile to disable it.

3.4 Python Support

The support for Python (http://www.python.org) is enabled automatically if configure detects that Python version 2.5 or later is installed on your machine.

If you do not wish to use Python, use --without-python to disable it.

3.5 Other Configure Settings

The dicod daemon uses syslogd for diagnostics. The default syslog facility can be set using LOG_FACILITY configuration variable. Its allowed arguments are ‘user’, ‘daemon’, ‘auth’, ‘authpriv’, ‘mail’, ‘cron’, and ‘local0’ through ‘local7’. Case is not significant. In addition, these words can be prefixed with ‘log_’.