What are some tips for troubleshooting builds of complicated software?

Posted by Goose Bumper on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Goose Bumper
Published on 2010-04-17T03:50:00Z Indexed on 2010/04/17 3:53 UTC
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Filed under:

Troubleshooting

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unix

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compiler

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build-process

Sometimes I want to build Python or GCC from scratch just for fun, but I can't parse the errors I get, or don't understand statements like "libtool link error # XYZ". What are some tricks that unix/systems gurus use to compile software of this size from scratch?

Of course I already do things like read config.log (if there is one), google around, and post in newsgroups. I'm looking for things that either

make the process go smoother or
get me more information about the error to help me understand and fix it.

It's a little tough to get this information sometimes, because some compile bugs can be quite obscure. What can I do at that point?

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