Building FRANKLIN on CentOS 5

 - This article is a Work in Progress, and may be unfinished or missing sections.

Introduction

This HOWTO covers the basic steps required to build Zimbra. For more information, see these essential documents:

• Building Zimbra on Solaris
• Building Zimbra using Perforce
• Franklin README

These might be helpful, too:

• Building Zimbra on FreeBSD
• Building Zimbra on Ubuntu Hardy

Getting the source

There are two main places where to get the Zimbra sources:

• Zimbra Community Builds (http://sourceforge.net/projects/zimbracommunity)
• Zimbra's official Perforce repositories (instructions below)

To download official Zimbra sources, first get proprietary Perforce client (free) from http://www.perforce.com/perforce/downloads/platform.html. Next create a temporary directory for the sources

$ mkdir /home/username/temp

Next do some linking to work around p4's default behaviour:

$ ln -s /home/username/temp /home/public

Then export some P4-related environment variables and do a full resync. This is required, because p4 is a proprietary program and it can't track changes for the public account.

$ export P4EDITOR=nano
$ export P4PORT=codes.zimbra.com:2666
$ p4 -u public -P public1234 -c public-view sync -f //depot/zcs/FRANKLIN/...

Perforce should now start downloading the source code.

Preparing the build environment

Stock CentOS5 install has only a few basic repositories configured. You need to add rpmforge to your list of yum repositories. You can get the repository information and instructions from http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rpmforge-release.

Troubleshooting

Zimbra build problems can be divided into a couple main categories:

• Undocumented, missing dependencies
• Faulty assumptions about the build environment
• Problems with the sources or the downloaded source tree

Instead of trying to document every problem I encountered, I'll simply describe how these problems can be circumvented.

Finding and installing missing dependencies

It's certain that Zimbra won't build cleanly if you just follow the various Wiki articles and README files. When the build fails, it's usually due to a missing dependency. If the error message tells you which software package is missing, you can just guess the package name

$ yum search package
$ yum install package

Most likely you need lots of development packages. They are named something-devel in CentOS. If the build process complains about a single missing file, you can find it by installing yum-utils and then using repoquery to locate the package containing the missing file:

$ yum install yum-utils
$ repoquery -a -f *missing-file

This is similar to using apt-file on Debian-based systems.