Installation of GPG alongside a running one: configure problem?

Question

I already have a production version of GPG from a previous installation.

I would like to build and test the last version of GPG without interfering with the production one. I am performing this test on MacOS X 10.10.3, but ideally this validation process should be independent of the OS.

I created a new repository directory different of the one where the running GPG is:

mkdir /local/gpg2

I downloaded the 4 required libraries and the gnupg archive:

libgpg-error-1.19
libgcrypt-1.6.3
libksba-1.3.3
libassuan-2.2.1
gnupg-2.0.27

I successfully built and installed libgpg-error:

cd libgpg-error-1.19
./configure --prefix=/local/gpg2
make
make install

and started to build libgcrypt:

cd ../libgcrypt-1.6.3
./configure --prefix=/local/gpg2

and this process fails with:

checking for gpg-error-config... no
checking for GPG Error - version >= 1.11... no
configure: error: libgpg-error is needed.
                See ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt/libgpg-error/ .

I checked config.log where:

exec_prefix=NONE
prefix='/local/gpg2'
libdir='${exec_prefix}/lib'

and everything seems correct.

---

Where is this configuration problem coming from?

Answer 1

Since you're installing in non-standard locations, you'll need to tell each configure script where to find things. ./configure --help should give an indication of the appropriate option; for libgcrypt you'd run

./configure --prefix=/local/gpg2 --with-libgpg-error-prefix=/local/gpg2

Except that because of a bug in libgcrypt's configure script, only --with-gpg-error-prefix works, so you need to run

./configure --prefix=/local/gpg2 --with-gpg-error-prefix=/local/gpg2

The bug is already fixed in upstream's repository; it's #1467.