Installing Seagull on Mac OS X

Sunday, November 22, 2009 em 04:29
Ahh... Nothing like a rainy Saturday to get in the mood for some tasks that were delayed for too long!

As I was getting ready to watch the soccer match between FC Porto (my team) and Oliveirense, at Oliveirense's stadium, the referee decided that there were no conditions (really bad pitch, also due to the rain) for the game to happen... well, I had to do something... :-)

Installing Seagull (the network traffic generator, useful for my Diameter tests) in my iMac was one of those tasks that I could never find the time, and today it seemed a good day. I knew it was not going to be a simple task, as I've tried sometime ago to install (ie, build from source) under Ubuntu or some other Linux distro and never made it... but I didn't tried hard either, as there are RHEL/Fedora binaries I just setup a VM with it.

OK.. So, first step was to look for someone who had already done the job... couldn't find any, seems like Mac's are not chosen as dev machines very often. No binaries, no instructions. I'm on my own.

The INSTALL.TXT has some instructions on how to build it... the commands to run. I'll do it as I like to: run until it crashes and see what's wrong after. First instruction is:
Edit build.conf to fit your needs (default should be OK)

If it says it should be OK, it should be OK. Let's move on.
run "./build.ksh -target clean"

Just to make sure everything is clean. Not a problem, no issues here. Next!
run "./build.ksh -target all"

This is where the "fun" began. It simply failed with some  generic failure message:
[Begin Makefile generation phase]
[Creating symbolic link: /Users/ammendonca/Desktop/seagull/bin]
[Making directory: /Users/ammendonca/Desktop/seagull/work-1.8.1]
[Making directory: /Users/ammendonca/Desktop/seagull/build-1.8.1]
make: *** [/Users/ammendonca/Desktop/seagull/work-1.8.1/project.mk] Error 1
 
[Begin compilation phase]
make: *** No rule to make target `all'.  Stop.

Nice, isn't it? Not much clues of what and where it is failing. After running some pieces of the make script by itself, I got to ./work-1.8.1/compiler.mk file where it said "Compiler variable for OS DARWIN not defined".

For adding this information, it was needed to edit the ./build.conf afterall :-). So I just copied all the (...)_LINUX entries and renamed them to _DARWIN, et voilá. It worked.

Next ran, next failure:
[Compiling protocol-external/C_ProtocolExternal.cpp]
[Compiling protocol-text/C_MessageText.cpp]
cc1plus: warnings being treated as errors
protocol-text/C_MessageText.cpp: In member function 'C_ProtocolFrame::_msg_error_code C_MessageText::EncodeWithContentLength(int)':
protocol-text/C_MessageText.cpp:62: warning: format '%d' expects type 'int', but argument 4 has type 'size_t'
make[1]: *** [/Users/ammendonca/Desktop/seagull/work-1.8.1/C_MessageText.o] Error 1
make: *** [all_seagull] Error 2

This was a pretty simple and obvious one. Just learned how size_t should be printed, it's with %Zd instead of the %d that is present. Made that change at line 62 of ./protocol-text/C_MessageText.cpp and that's it!

One step closer... but not there yet:
[Compiling /Users/ammendonca/Desktop/seagull/work-1.8.1/y.tab.c]
y.tab.c: In function 'int yyparse()':
y.tab.c:1349: error: 'yylex' was not declared in this scope
y.tab.c:1587: error: 'yyerror' was not declared in this scope
y.tab.c:1733: error: 'yyerror' was not declared in this scope
make[1]: *** [/Users/ammendonca/Desktop/seagull/work-1.8.1/y.tab.o] Error 1
make: *** [all_seagull] Error 2

Checking the referred y.tab.c I've checked it declared those methods only if some vars (__linux__ OR __CYGWIN__) were declared. This should be some compiler info as my friend grep didn't found any reference on the seagull sources. Googled a little bit and just found what it was and so I checked it should be __APPLE__ for my system.

A previous message showed that this y.tab.c file was being generated and, so, with the help of grep I managed to find out that it came from ./xml-parser/xml_definition.y, at line 38. Changed
#if defined(__linux__) || defined(__CYGWIN__)
to
#if defined(__linux__) || defined(__CYGWIN__) || defined(__APPLE__)

It was almost there... got the binary seagull already linked in the ./bin folder! Good news, but still some required lib is failing to link:
[Linking /Users/ammendonca/Desktop/seagull/build-1.8.1/libtrans_ip.so]
Undefined symbols:
  "_main", referenced from:
      start in crt1.10.5.o
ld: symbol(s) not found
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [/Users/ammendonca/Desktop/seagull/build-1.8.1/libtrans_ip.so] Error 1
make: *** [all_libtrans_ip.so] Error 2

Boooring! Thought this could be it... so much work and now some weird linkage error was going to throw it all away. Well.. can't give up, tried some own ideas... then went googling, nothing much useful, every linkage error seems to have this same output.

Since it referred main, started looking for it.. no sign of it in the files being linked. Hmm.. that makes sense, it's a library, why would it need to have a main anyway? After checking the flags being used for compilation, just found out this one for compiling a library was not present: -dynamiclib

So I added it to BUILD_LIB_LD_FLAGS_DARWIN in ./build.conf which now looked like this:
BUILD_LIB_LD_FLAGS_DARWIN="-shared -fPIC -dynamiclib"

Yeah! Everything worked just fine! The install was completed successfully and all the binaries were in the bin folder. Hurray!

This was a lengthy journey but in the end it was fruitful.. as always, when it works ;-) Seagull v1.8.1 running on Mac OS X 10.5.6 (Leopard)!

Notes:
  1. Apple Dev Tools are required to be installed prior to any of this being made. They can be found in  the Install DVD;
  2. I had to run the commands with "sudo" as it required permissions for some operations;
  3. Optionally you can run "./install.ksh" to copy Seagull binaries and config files as suggested in INSTALL.TXT and perform the remaining actions, if needed.

Please let me know if this has been useful for you and/or if something is inaccurate. This has been tested against Seagull 1.7.0 and 1.8.1 on Mac OS X 10.5.6 (Leopard).