Compiling a Unix application in Linux [closed]

Question

Clearly there's similarities in the underlying operating system when it comes to Unix and Linux.

Is there a reason why compiling a Makefile won't compile on a Linux OS versus on a FreeBSD or OSX OS won't compile?

For instance, installing the following application compiles successfully on a FreeBSD OS but won't compile on CentOS or Ubuntu.

http://www.superscript.com/trigger/install.html

Are there libraries or kernel headers that are missing within the Linux OS that require to build this specific Makefile?

Here's the Makefile for reference: https://github.com/SuperScript/trigger/blob/master/src/Makefile

Here's what I get when trying to run package\compile on Linux machine.

# package/compile
sh makefile.build default.build load load
makefile.build: line 30: .: default.build: file not found
sh makefile.build default.build systype systype
makefile.build: line 30: .: default.build: file not found
sh makefile.build default.build compile compile
makefile.build: line 30: .: default.build: file not found
sh makefile.build default.o.build trigger-pull.o trigger-pull
makefile.build: line 30: .: default.o.build: file not found

Answer 1

Having looked at the various and peculiar build scripts that this software package is using, it appears as if it's written for a /bin/sh shell that by default allows the . command (source in the bash shell) to read and run dot-scripts from the current directory even when the script's path is not explicitly given and the current directory is not in $PATH (or the developers assume that you have . in $PATH, which you generally don't have and shouldn't have).

The solution to this is to patch the src/makefile.build script so that the build_do shell function on line 29 reads

build_do() {
  ( . ./"$build_it_cmds" "$1" "$2" "$3" > "$3" )
}

Note the added ./.

You should probably then also submit a bug report about this to the project. This is fortunately extremely easy to do with GitHub, although I see that no development has been happening on this project since 2012 so I don't know whether it's dead or not.