Building Erlang R9C2 under OpenBSD 3.6-current (Sept 26,2006)

[Geoff White]

Greeting.
I tried to build R9C2 from the source and ran into a couple of minor 
problems. When I built it on the bleeding edge OpenBSD.

1) OpenBSD comes preloaded with OpenSSL but it is not where the configure 
script for R9C2 expects it to be.  Furthermore, neither the UNIX readme nor 
the help from configure --help , list the required option to configure 
erlang with ssl & crypto support.,  I stumbled upon the right option by 
accidentally listing the README.win32, so,  you must do ...

/configure --with-ssl-includes=/usr/include/openssl 
--with-ssl-libraries=/usr/lib

Make sure you have done a "gmake clean",  if you forget to do this, you 
will never get this to compile,even if you do enter the correct options!!

2) There doesn't seem to be a compile flag for OpenBSD and configure 
deduces that it is a BSD4_4 system.  This creates a problem when compiling 
the file  .../lib/os_mon/c_src/memsup.c.  OpenBSD  does not use 
vm/vm_param.h, it used sys/vmmeter.h, like FreeBSD.  To get it to compile, 
I just added this include into the #ifdef as so...
#ifdef BSD4_4
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/sysctl.h>
#include <sys/vmmeter.h>
/* #include <vm/vm_param.h> */
#ifdef __FreeBSD__
#include <sys/vmmeter.h>
#endif
#endif

this is not the production solution but it got me going, I leave it to the 
erlang  release crew to figure out the *right thing*.  Maybe an 
__OpenBSD__  flag ;-)

3) Had a minor problem at the very end, with catman. catman doesn't seem to 
be installed by default under OpenBSD, even though there is a copy in the 
source distribution under /usr/src/usr.sbin/catman.
A quick "make; make install", places catman in /usr/sbin/catman. 
Unfortunately the script that actually uses this program doesn't know about 
openbsd, it tests for "BSDness" by testing for /vmunix, which does not 
exist on OpenBSD, and would set the path to catman incorrectly anyway, the 
work around is to execute the last command by hand...

cd  /usr/local/lib/erlang/misc; /usr/sbin/catman -M 
/usr/local/lib/erlang/man > /dev/null 2>&1

4) A better location to install erlang by default (for OpenBSD) would be 
/usr/local instead of /usr/local/lib

cheers,

geoffw