Hi Marc,
Are you still interested in building perfbook on macOS?
I'm now working on improving perfbook's build scripts so that
they can work on BSD-like systems such as FreeBSD.
It turns out that there are a couple of commands whose non-GNU
implementations may not suffice for building perfbook.
- sed: Need multi-line editing support (N/A in FreeBSD sed).
- grep: Need -z option (N/A in Busybox grep on alpine, may
depend on version/config).
- date: Need GNU style options. (Incompatible with BSD ones)
(This is by no means complete.)
Among them, the most probable cause of the error you encountered
last June is the "date" command in utilities/autodate.sh.
It assumes GNU date. The generated autodate.tex you provided at
the time indicates you have "date" from BSD.
I have updated autodate.sh so that both GNU and BSD variants of
date can be used.
Also, there are several "{"s in egrep patterns which are invalid
in non-GNU grep.
I have made them portable by saying "[}]" instead.
A WIP branch is available at:
https://github.com/akiyks/perfbook/tree/WIP-portable-build
I'd be delighted if you could give it a try on a macOS system.
Running "make" (or "gmake" if that is the name of GNUmake) on the
branch will complain about incapable command(s).
Running "make precheck" will do the test without building perfbook.
Sometimes, you need to keep BSD and GNU variants with different names.
For example, on FreeBSD, GNU sed is provided as a package named "gsed"
with the command name of "gsed".
Such alternative names can be provided via make variables as well as
environment variables, such as "make SED=gsed", "make DATE=gdate",
"export SED=gsed; make", "export DATE=gdate; make", and so on.
There is no such knob for the grep command at the moment. In case macOS
needs it, I can easily add it.
Documentation on this portability improvement is not yet available in
the WIP branch. I'm hoping I can add it shortly based on this email
message.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Thanks, Akira
