Hi all,

Just got through building an install from James darcs repo, figured I ought to be testing some of the changes before sending patches through (at least compiling, you know?).

Woo Doggies, was that fun!  I had all kinds of interesting issues.  Perhaps I can speed up the process a bit for the next guy.

Firstly, I installed the latest Debian from the net-inst CD, as a desktop-- so you don't automatically get all of the packages.  Installing darcs and pulling the code was easy.  

Next, I had to install autoconf.  Its worth noting that it is not installed by default via the above methods.  That -is- covered in the wiki.

Next, sh autogen.sh fails, as my gcc is unable to create compiled objects!  Indeed, attempting to compile hello.c shows that it can't find stdio.h-- turns out, although gcc is installed by default, the libraries (libc6) aren't!  How silly!  Uninstalling and reinstalling gcc picked up the dependent libraries, correcting that.  You could probably just install the libraries instead, but I wanted to be sure I wasn't missing anything.

Next, the ubiquitous gbdm could not be found.  This one took awhile-- it wasn't even on my system, even though I had the package libgdbm3 installed!  It turns out, you need to install the libgdbm3-dev package, if you want the source files (I know, duh, but it could happen to anyone :-).  So I installed that.

The heavens opened up and the angels sang! sh tests/build goes through!  The code compiles!  Now I just have to find where the installation went...

I suggest the following additions to the wiki page "Building Vanilla from Darcs", at 

http://wiki.us.netrek.org/netrek-dev/Building/FromDarcs

Adding the following packages to the required list:  libgdbm-dev, libc6 
Perhaps adding a note, or faq, about common problems and solutions, starting with the two above.  They may be basic, but then, so are lots of people.

Now, where'd that installation go...

Rich