Thu, 29 Mar 2007

Compile ming Flash generation library on OS X (ming 0.4.0 beta 4)

libming is "a library for generating Macromedia Flash files (.swf), written in C". As of the current beta (0.4.0.beta4) it does not compile out of the box for me (OS X 10.4 PPC) so I thought I'd write up what worked for me.

For future reference, when trying to compile out of the box the following error occurs when trying to generate libming.0.4.0.dylib: 

ld: Undefined symbols:
_yylex
/usr/bin/libtool: internal link edit command failed
The problem seems to occur when linking against libfl, I'm not entirely clear why it happens but if you remove the library from the link process the problem "goes away"—seemingly with no ill effects—the small patch below implements this work around.

How to compile

It seems I had the necessary dependencies (such as libpng) already installed but if you don't you might want to follow the existing ming OS X installation instructions for that.

Okay, here's what you need to do: 

wget http://dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ming/ming-0.4.0.beta4.tar.bz2
tar xjvf ming-0.4.0.beta4.tar.bz2
cd ming-0.4.0.beta4
Now we need to apply our patch osx_ming_0.4.0.b4.patch to workaround the error: 
wget http://words.rancidbacon.com/static/osx_ming_0.4.0.b4.patch
patch < osx_ming_0.4.0.b4.patch
Then continue: 
./configure
We then need to work around a permissions isssue: 
chmod u+x config/install-sh
Finally, we get on with: 
make
And that should be it...

You can install the library now or run a quick test: 

cd test/Movie/new/
make test01
./test01
../../../util/listswf test01.swf | diff -u test01.ref -
The last command should result in no output—if there are any differences things didn't go as planned...

Hopefully things did go as planned however and you can now start playing with ming on OS X...

The future

I've been working with the ming people on #gnash and hopefully the fixes will be included before the next release. It appears this can be applied to the version in CVS to fix the flex library issue in the proper place: 

--- configure.in~       2007-02-22 07:32:11.000000000 +1300
+++ configure.in        2007-03-29 04:33:23.000000000 +1200
@@ -198,7 +198,6 @@
 dnl --------------------------------------------
 
 AC_PROG_YACC
-AM_PROG_LEX
 AC_PROG_LIBTOOL
 if test x"$LIBTOOL" = x; then
        AC_MSG_ERROR([could not detect libtool, bailing out])

Posted at: 05:35 | category: / | Tags: , , , | Comments ()