Installing Irssi on Unix-system in userspace

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One may sometimes have to compile irssi by themself under a shell account on Unix system. My problem was that the irssi at the shell had no support for SSL encrypted connections, and a private irc server I'm using allows only SSL encrypted connections - so I decided to compile it on my own. Here's how to do it - the OS was NetBSD, but the installation is similiar in Linux and propably under other operating systems too.

Do note that if you ran into problems you can mail me, but really, you should rather mail developers of irssi.

So here's what I did...

After connecting to my shell account with ssh-client the following was done (hilighted lines were my commands.

Part 1.

We begin in home directory and create a directory temp directory, download irssi sourcecode package (instead of the wget-command you can also download it from irssi.org and save it to the temp directory) and extract it.

soul ~ >mkdir temp ; cd temp soul ~/temp >wget http://irssi.org/files/irssi-0.8.10a.tar.gz --06:11:14-- http://irssi.org/files/irssi-0.8.10a.tar.gz => `irssi-0.8.10a.tar.gz' Resolving irssi.org... 85.158.210.65 Connecting to irssi.org|85.158.210.65|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found Location: http://mirror.irssi.org/irssi-0.8.10a.tar.gz [following] --06:11:14-- http://mirror.irssi.org/irssi-0.8.10a.tar.gz => `irssi-0.8.10a.tar.gz' Resolving mirror.irssi.org... 85.158.210.65 Connecting to mirror.irssi.org|85.158.210.65|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 1,056,233 (1.0M) [application/x-gzip] 100%[=========================================================>] 1,056,233 1.07M/s 06:11:15 (1.07 MB/s) - `irssi-0.8.10a.tar.gz' saved [1056233/1056233] soul ~/temp >tar xvfz irssi-0.8.10a.tar.gz irssi-0.8.10 irssi-0.8.10/Makefile.in irssi-0.8.10/README irssi-0.8.10/stamp-h.in irssi-0.8.10/AUTHORS irssi-0.8.10/COPYING irssi-0.8.10/ChangeLog irssi-0.8.10/INSTALL irssi-0.8.10/Makefile.am irssi-0.8.10/NEWS irssi-0.8.10/TODO irssi-0.8.10/acconfig.h *** SNIP *** soul ~/temp >cd irssi-0.8.10 soul ~/temp/irssi-0.8.10 >

Part 2.

Create subdirectory for software installation under your home directory and search the path for Perl, if it's installed (note, this can also be installed under home directory). Without perl we won't have support for scripting in irssi and personally I think it's essential.
Well, let's just try simply with running ./configure script with parameter telling to install under subdirectory in users homedir:

soul ~/temp/irssi-0.8.10 >mkdir ~/softa soul ~/temp/irssi-0.8.10 >./configure --prefix=$HOME/softa *** SNIP *** Building text frontend ........... : yes, using terminfo Building irssi bot ............... : no Building irssi proxy ............. : no Building with module support ..... : yes Building with Perl support ....... : static (in irssi binary) Perl library directory ........... : /home/users/robsku/softa/lib/perl5/5.8.0/x86_64-netbsd-thread-multi - NOTE: This was automatically set to the same directory you gave with --prefix. If you want the perl libraries to install to their 'correct' path, you'll need to give --with-perl-lib=site option to configure. Anyway, installing perl to this directory should work just as well. Install prefix ................... : /home/users/robsku/softa Building with IPv6 support ....... : yes Building with SSL support ........ : yes Building with 64bit DCC support .. : yes Building with garbage collector .. : no If there was any problems, read the INSTALL file. soul ~/temp/irssi-0.8.10 >

Well, this seems fine, except for the text at 'Perl library directory' that was set to be under the given installation directory. We can simply run this again with --with-perl-lib=site parameter set to point to the right directory - just first we need to find out where is '/lib/perl5/5.8.0/x86_64-netbsd-thread-multi' with locate:

Find /lib/perl5/5.8.0/x\86_64-netbsd-thread-multi with 'locate'
re-run ./configure and point to that directory

soul ~/temp/irssi-0.8.10 >locate /lib/perl5/5.8.0/x\86_64-netbsd-thread-multi /usr/pkg/lib/perl5/5.8.0/x86_64-netbsd-thread-multi /usr/pkg/lib/perl5/5.8.0/x86_64-netbsd-thread-multi/.packlist /usr/pkg/lib/perl5/5.8.0/x86_64-netbsd-thread-multi/B /usr/pkg/lib/perl5/5.8.0/x86_64-netbsd-thread-multi/B/Asmdata.pm /usr/pkg/lib/perl5/5.8.0/x86_64-netbsd-thread-multi/B/Assembler.pm /usr/pkg/lib/perl5/5.8.0/x86_64-netbsd-thread-multi/B/Bblock.pm /usr/pkg/lib/perl5/5.8.0/x86_64-netbsd-thread-multi/B/Bytecode.pm /usr/pkg/lib/perl5/5.8.0/x86_64-netbsd-thread-multi/B/C.pm *** SNIP ***

We obviously found the right directory - now we can re-run ./configure and point that directory... and then proceed to compile & install!

Part 3.

soul ~/temp/irssi-0.8.10 >./configure --prefix=$HOME/softa --with-perl-lib=/usr/pkg/lib/perl5/5.8.0 *** SNIP *** Building text frontend ........... : yes, using terminfo Building irssi bot ............... : no Building irssi proxy ............. : no Building with module support ..... : yes Building with Perl support ....... : static (in irssi binary) Perl library directory ........... : /usr/pkg/lib/perl5/5.8.0/x86_64-netbsd-thread-multi Install prefix ................... : /home/users/robsku/softa Building with IPv6 support ....... : yes Building with SSL support ........ : yes Building with 64bit DCC support .. : yes Building with garbage collector .. : no If there was any problems, read the INSTALL file.

Part 4.

And finally we are going to run make and make install to compile irssi and install it under homedirectory of user:

soul ~/temp/irssi-0.8.10 >make *** SNIP *** Making all in docs Making all in help Making all in in Making info in in Making all in scripts Making all in examples soul ~/temp/irssi-0.8.10 >make install Making install in src Making install in lib-popt /usr/pkg/bin/bash ../../mkinstalldirs /home/users/robsku/softa/include/irssi/src /lib-popt mkdir /home/users/robsku/softa/include mkdir /home/users/robsku/softa/include/irssi mkdir /home/users/robsku/softa/include/irssi/src mkdir /home/users/robsku/softa/include/irssi/src/lib-popt *** SNIP *** mkdir /home/users/robsku/softa/etc /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./irssi.conf /home/users/robsku/softa/etc/irssi.conf /usr/pkg/bin/bash ./mkinstalldirs /home/users/robsku/softa/share/irssi/themes mkdir /home/users/robsku/softa/share/irssi/themes /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./default.theme /home/users/robsku/softa/share/irssi /themes/default.theme /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./colorless.theme /home/users/robsku/softa/share/irssi/themes/colorless.theme /usr/pkg/bin/bash ./mkinstalldirs /home/users/robsku/softa/include/irssi /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 config.h /home/users/robsku/softa/include/irssi/conf ig.h /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 irssi-version.h /home/users/robsku/softa/include/irs si/irssi-version.h soul ~/temp/irssi-0.8.10 >cd ~/softa soul ~/softa >ll total 24 drwxr-xr-x 2 robsku users 512 Oct 6 16:05 bin drwxr-xr-x 2 robsku users 512 Oct 6 16:05 etc drwxr-xr-x 3 robsku users 512 Oct 6 16:05 include drwxr-xr-x 2 robsku users 512 Oct 6 14:35 lib drwxr-xr-x 3 robsku users 512 Oct 6 16:05 man drwxr-xr-x 4 robsku users 512 Oct 6 16:05 share soul ~/softa >ll bin total 10080 -rwxr-xr-x 1 robsku users 5142384 Oct 6 16:05 irssi soul ~/softa >./bin/irssi -!

Part 5.

ALL DONE!