Trouble compiling ncurses-st-menu for BSD

Question

I found a package on github (https://github.com/okbob/ncurses-st-menu) and am having trouble compile it for BSD platforms like NetBSD or OpenBSD. The instructions say to do ./autogen.sh, ./configure, and then make. So I install the autoconf, autotools, libtool, gettext, and any other necessary packages and run ./autogen.sh. It works without spitting out any errors. But ./configure says it doesn't support "OS x86_64-unknown-netbsd9.0" if for example on NetBSD. Can someone else try to compile this program? Because if this was done by autotools, it certainly should support any of the four major BSD operating systems.

Answer 1

I don't know the autogen/config tools, but if you look the configure file:

https://github.com/okbob/ncurses-st-menu/blob/master/configure lines 4245-4269 only checks for linux,cygwin,mingw.

For other OS gives the error: OS $host_os is not supported

Answer 2

I created a port for FreeBSD here, maybe it will help you get it running on NetBSD. The most important part is the removal of the AC_MSG_ERROR(["OS $host_os is not supported"]) line from tools/ax_pdcurses.m4, then touching config.make, calling autogen.sh to re-generate the configure script. It's also important to set CFLAGS properly and have the appropriate dependencies installed. Also, I used gmake rather than patch the Makefile since I didn't feel motivated to fix it completely.