On Mon, Nov 05, 2012 at 09:21:13AM -0800, Mathieu Dutour wrote: First, note that this list is a support channel for Git newbies, and your question appears to be more about Git source code itself so I'd say it better fits the main Git list which is git at vger.kernel.org. I Cc'ed this my response here in the hope someone with the platform similar to yours might chime in; so please keep the Cc list in your responses. > I tried to install git on an IBM power 6 computer and I had the following > problem when doing "gmake install" This doesn't sound quite descriptive. From what I gather from the Internet, IBM POWER 6 is a CPU brand, targeted at mainframes. I vaguely recall IBM mainframes typically run their own OS (z/OS?) but have extensive support for virtualization so I recall I read somewhere it's customary to run, say, a virtualized Linux-based OS on it. Since what matters here is a *software* platform, please be (way) more precise about this. > ./configure[6213]: syntax error at line 6367 : `;' unexpected "configure" is just a shell script usually generated by the "autoconf" program from a template file named "configure.in". "configure" is meant to be über-portable, but it assumes your /bin/sh is a shell implementing the command language defined by POSIX, plus a standard set of text-processing tools (such as sed and grep) is available. I can make a guess that whatever is available as /bin/sh in your system might not quite fit the expectations of "configure". I envision two ways to fix this: 1) Install autoconf and run it to regenerate the configure script; then try the compilation again. 2) Try to force configure using a different shell, if available. GNU bash should cut it, ash and dash [1] too. In either case note that there isn't any indication that that syntax error actually made the build process to fail; the only failing error in the output you quoted is that of the `install` command which runs after the compilation is done to install things (obviously). By this I mean, if you will be able to fix that `install` error it might turn out you could ignore the configure error whatsoever. > gmake[2]: `GIT-VERSION-FILE' is up to date. > GEN git-instaweb > SUBDIR git-gui > SUBDIR gitk-git > gmake[1]: Nothing to be done for `all'. > SUBDIR perl > SUBDIR git_remote_helpers > SUBDIR templates > install -d -m 755 '/home/ar69ovim/opt/git-1.8.0/bin' > /usr/bin/getopt: Not a recognized flag: d > Usage: install [-c DirectoryA] [-f DirectoryB] [-i] [-m] [-M Mode] [-O > Owner] > [-G Group] [-S] [-n DirectoryC] [-o] [-s] File [DirectoryX > ...] Supposedly Git makefiles expect the `install` program to support the "-d" command line option. On my Linux system with `install` provided by GNU coreutils [2], the "-d" command line option of this tool is used to create the whole directory hierarchy according to the argument passed to that option. Obviously your `install` does not support this option. Moreover, from the error output it follows, that your `install` is implemented as a shell script which calls /usr/bin/getopt to parse its command-line options. Again, I can see several ways to fix that: 1) Patch Git makefile(s) to use some other means to create directory hierarchies. For instance, some versions of `mkdir` support the "-p" command line option to do this. You could combine `mkdir -p` with `chmod 755` to do what `install -d -m 755` would do. 2) (Somehow) get GNU coreutils and make Git makefiles see /usr/bin/install provided by this package. 3) Patch your `install` to support "-d". > gmake: *** [install] Error 2 That's what makes the whole thing fail. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Almquist_shell 2. http://gnu.org/software/coreutils -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html