Thanks Rich, that worked.

I also had to compile augeas and specify 'AUGEAS_LIBS=~/.local/lib AUGEAS_CFLAGS="-O3"' for it to be picked up.

The problem I'm hitting now is:
configure: error: libmagic (part of the "file" command) is required.
Please install the file devel package

I have manually installed the contents of the file-devel RPM and its dependency file-libs into ~/.local/, so I now have libmagic.so under ~/.local/lib64/. Any idea how I can get ./configure to pick this up? I tried LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/.local/lib64 but this didn't seem to work.

I'm hopeful this might be the last piece that's missing!

Thanks for your help,
Lewis

On Sat, 1 May 2021 at 17:07, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com> wrote:
On Sat, May 01, 2021 at 02:26:37PM +0100, Lewis Gaul wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm trying to build/install libguestfs (for virt-edit) on a RHEL7 server, where
> I have no root access. I couldn't find any pre-built binaries online, so have
> been trying to build from source (downloaded from https://
> download.libguestfs.org/). I'm using the latest stable version, 1.44.1.
>
> I have followed the instructions at https://libguestfs.org/
> guestfs-building.1.html, but './configure' is failing with:
> checking for gperf... no
> configure: error: gperf must be installed
>
> Indeed, it seems gperf is not installed. I then built gperf from source and
> symlinked the binary to '~/bin/gperf', which is on my PATH.
>
> The problem is that I can't work out how to get libguestfs's ./configure script
> to pick up this manually-compiled copy of gperf (which I don't have permissions
> to place in a standard location under /usr/).
>
> Can anyone suggest a solution/workaround?

I think you should be able to do:

  ./configure GPERF=$HOME/bin/gperf

If not then try fiddling around with m4/guestfs-progs.m4 to see if you
can come up with a workable patch.

Rich.

> (There may be a similar problem for some of the other external dependencies
> that are checked after gperf - I couldn't see a way to get configure to
> continue on failure or equivalent).
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Lewis

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