Well, I’ll give you the details: it’s missing an assembler. You can find out about this if you actually bother to read the config.log file in the srclib/apr dir:

The simple fix: install an assembler. Slackware has the binutils package for that.
slackpkg install binutils, done.

Anyway, I decided to upgrade my 0.9.15 installation since it still glitches every now and then.
With glitches I mean “The music played by mpd suddenly sounds as if you have quad damage in quake 3 arena and filter out most of the music frequencies”. You know, when you shoot a quad damage rocket through a hallway, that kind of sound. Restarting pulseaudio always fixes this. (I’ve been running into this glitch ever since I started using pulse). Seems to occur randomly though… sometimes when the server is busy, sometimes when switching from a .mod file to a .mp3 file, sometimes just when the lights turn on. You know the kind of glitch.
Other than I kind of enjoy pulseaudio, even though it’s a struggle to get going. It does allow our server to stream to other servers and stuff like that, which is very cute. Oh, and per application volume levels and mixing etc… also good.
This pulseaudio installation runs on our local server — in daemon/server mode — btw, on which we have connected our amplifier and speakers as to enlighten our office/game room/throne chamber.

So for compiling version 0.9.16 the first thing I ran into was libsndfile that was outdated. Version 1.0.17 was too old, so I ran slackbuild on the new libsndfile v1.0.20.tar.gz. Out came a package, upgrade, voila.
Next, I noticed the pulseaudio configure output telling me:

I kinda wondered why, since my system definately runs udev. In config.log we find:

Aha.
New challenge!
Let’s see if we can grab the official slackware udev sources and get them to run a newer package! Today the latest udev is udev version 1.4.6.
So I changed the udev.Slackbuild to pick version 1.4.6

Running udev.Slackbuild now soon brought another set of issues to my attention. The first being that the slackware patch for the rule generator breaks.
Without looking too much at the script I simply manually patched it and created a new diff. Here it is:
rule_generator.diff.gz - Version 0.1 - SHA: cf73f104543ce989fd11b383c440405110e915a2

Running the slackbuild now gave me a new error:

It never takes me long to realize that this error stems from the new kernel I installed earlier. (did I mention that linux 2.6.31 is released? ).
Google brought me this, which informs us about something that should have been in 2.6.31 if you ask me. Fine, we’ll fix it ourselves.
Another slackbuild run takes us past this error and gives us a new udev package. Inspecting the new package I noticed a /libexec directory that shouldn’t be in the root of the package. Meh, probably explains the configure: WARNING: unrecognized options: --with-libdir-name.
So we change the udev.Slackbuild again with some new configure options (stolen from their own INSTALL file):

Btw, can someone explain to me why I always manage to fuck up the file order to diff? (my patches normally come out reversed )
Here’s the complete file if you want it:
udev.Slackbuild - Version 1.4.6 - SHA: d550e146bdf34d1ad0e256936a94b7f9b7d62fd2

So after building and upgrading the package, it even restarted without glitches. Woei.
Back to pulseaudio!

Running configure now correctly informs us about udev being YES. HAL->udev compat still said “no” though. I don’t care for now, let’s see if it works.
My slackbuild.pl ran the make part and showed a ton of “leer coden, mongool” warnings (people should simply disable warnings if they don’t handle them if you ask me).
Regardless of the warnings the compilation completed and I now have a shiny new package.
After upgrading and restarting pulseaudio, there’s even sound coming out of my speakers when I hinted mpd to play. Woei.

Oh. Boost….. that time of the month. If there’s one piece of trash I’ve run into very often on my compilation expeditions…. it’s boost. What a cancer piece of trash that is. You wouldn’t believe the amount of cursing I’ve gone through on my trails through “build from source” land because of boost. It never works, and when it does it’s limping on. They should have called it “blast” instead.
These days boost is in the official slackware repositories. You’d think that would help, since I can’t mess up the paths etc anymore. (compiling boost is another disaster btw, don’t go there unless you like torture). But noo, as usual the programs that use boost (“because we can’t code ™”, or at least, that’s what I think) are so good at coding stuff themselves that they fail the autoconf for it as well. Prutsers. Well, to be honest, if they can’t code it themselves it’s probably smart to use a library that handles it for them….. but boost? :/

Anyway, back to qBitTorrent. Actually, it’s libtorrent-rasterbar that’s failing. Attempt 1, configure with only a prefix and no other options:

WHat?! Do you ahve Boost::System? Yes. I mean no!
… seriously, who comes up with this shit….
So we dig into config.log and find:

Or in other words: nothing we didn’t already know. FUCK.
Time for a trace.

…. /usr/lib? Says who? Not me, that’s for sure. idiots.
In fact, I’m quite sure that it’s in /usr/lib64.

Jup, as expected. Boost is kanker. Since boost doesn’t have the usual pkgconfig issues, we can only conclude that the reason is that either this configure.in was written by a moron, or that
boost supplies invalid tests for finding itself through the autoconf system. I suspect the latter, but that’s just me

In this case the solution is simple, since the configure script has an override option. Wonder why… maybe they ran into boost idiocies before?
The solution:

This runs through configure, it finds the boost garbage and runs through. And guess what? It even compiles!

The gist of this rant: autoconf is pretty useless if you make assumptions that autoconf is supposed to detect. If you write software, don’t assume this stuff, try to detect it.
Also: when it fails, give me an error message that is useful, not some generic error code. “Library not found” vs “library not found because libblabla.so doesn’t exist in /usr/lib”.

About qbittorrent: it’s a cute little torrent client for linux. Especially if you like faily lightweight stuff that does has a gui. The thing I like about those lightweight clients: they’re fast.
This one even has an RSS reader these days…. cute.
Here’s a screenie:

qbittorrent v1.5.0

So qBittorrent: keep up the good work, and get rid of boost

It’s a tiny little shell script that takes the configure options and barfs out some prefixes and stuff based on the options presented to it.
So when I tell it prefix=/usr, it will decide that sysconfdir=/etc instead of sysconfdir=/usr/etc.

You can get my my version here:
config.site - Version 0.1 - SHA:

Now the important tidbit. In order for configure to automagically use this script, you wil need to set the environment variable CONFIG_SITE.
Personally I do this through a profile file. Download the config.site script, put it in /etc and put the profile file in /etc/profile.d. Logout/login, done.
Oh, here’s the profile file:
config_site.sh - Version 0.1 - SHA: 3a6145987d03811f274ace34f5d08738f266f131

Now if everything worked out allright, running configure should start with something like this:

Wonderful isn’t it?