Compile syslog-ng from source on Mac M1 fails with unexpected token newline

[Genfood]

Hey folks,

I am currently trying to build syslog from source on a M1 Mac, but it fails if I try to run the configure script. I followed the available instructions, on how to build syslog-ng on Mac.

The CLI tells me:

% ./configure --with-ivykis=system --disable-java --prefix=$PWD/build
checking whether make supports nested variables... yes
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for a race-free mkdir -p... ./install-sh -c -d
checking for gawk... no
checking for mawk... no
checking for nawk... no
checking for awk... awk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking whether UID '501' is supported by ustar format... yes
checking whether GID '20' is supported by ustar format... yes
checking how to create a ustar tar archive... gnutar
checking for gcc... gcc
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
checking for suffix of executables... 
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether the compiler supports GNU C... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc option to enable C11 features... none needed
checking whether gcc understands -c and -o together... yes
checking whether make supports the include directive... yes (GNU style)
checking dependency style of gcc... gcc3
./configure: line 6168: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
./configure: line 6168: `    '''

I tried it with Apples clang compiler and I also installed a gcc version via brew. But I always got the same result. :(
Here is the log file:

And that's the error:

gcc: error: unrecognized command-line option '-V'
gcc: fatal error: no input files

Maybe someone knows what I am doing wrong here?

[czanik]

I do not have an ARM64 mac, just an old Intel MacBook Pro. I followed the instructions from https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-on-macos-ventura and was able to build both syslog-ng 4.0.1 and the latest git snapshot.

For 4.0.1 I started out from the release tgz: wget https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng/releases/download/syslog-ng-4.0.1/syslog-ng-4.0.1.tar.gz

For the git snapshot is used syslog-ng dbld to build a release tgz on Linux and then copied the tgz to my aging Mac. From the configure output I guess you did the same (it mentions 4.0.1.222.dirty as version, which is a release name dbld gives to locally modified git snapshots).

On the Mac I started bash (yes, I'm too much a Linux user :-) ), extracted the source and then:

brew install automake autoconf binutils glib autoconf-archive flex bison libtool pkg-config ivykis openssl pcre json-c
brew install net-snmp
export PATH=/usr/local/opt/bison/bin:$PATH
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/opt/openssl@1.1/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH"
export PATH="/usr/local/opt/net-snmp/bin:$PATH"
./configure --disable-java --with-ivykis=system --prefix=/Users/czanik/syslog-ng-4.0.1/sng
make
make install

Then I repeated the process for the git snapshot. The only difference was the configure --prefix argument:

./configure --disable-java --with-ivykis=system --prefix=/Users/czanik/syslog-ng-4.0.1.224.gf3974e3/sng

note: directory names are different on the ARM macs

In the end:

bash-3.2$ pwd
/Users/czanik/syslog-ng-4.0.1.224.gf3974e3/sng/sbin
bash-3.2$ ./syslog-ng -V
syslog-ng 4 (4.0.1.224.gf3974e3)
Config version: 4.0
Installer-Version: 4.0.1.224.gf3974e3
Revision: 
Compile-Date: Feb 24 2023 16:02:54
Module-Directory: /Users/czanik/syslog-ng-4.0.1.224.gf3974e3/sng/lib/syslog-ng
Module-Path: /Users/czanik/syslog-ng-4.0.1.224.gf3974e3/sng/lib/syslog-ng
Include-Path: /Users/czanik/syslog-ng-4.0.1.224.gf3974e3/sng/share/syslog-ng/include
Available-Modules: timestamp,kvformat,redis,riemann,appmodel,afprog,examples,rate-limit-filter,cef,map-value-pairs,afsnmp,kafka,stardate,system-source,confgen,afuser,xml,disk-buffer,tfgetent,linux-kmsg-format,correlation,json-plugin,add-contextual-data,pseudofile,affile,csvparser,basicfuncs,syslogformat,hook-commands,afmongodb,graphite,tags-parser,geoip2-plugin,afstomp,http,secure-logging,afsql,mod-python,afsocket,cryptofuncs,azure-auth-header,regexp-parser
Enable-Debug: off
Enable-GProf: off
Enable-Memtrace: off
Enable-IPv6: on
Enable-Spoof-Source: on
Enable-TCP-Wrapper: off
Enable-Linux-Caps: off
Enable-Systemd: off
bash-3.2$ 

[MrAnno]

Have you installed the Xcode command line tools? xcode-select --install
Instead of using Homebrew's gcc CC='gcc', I'd try using the builtin clang compiler.

[MrAnno]

Here is the full guide with the necessary build dependencies:
https://syslog-ng.gitbooks.io/getting-started/content/chapters/chapter_0/section_3.html

Also:
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/955021b2c365f4d020968962f61f5f10aea1b120/Formula/syslog-ng.rb

[Genfood]

I tried both first with clang than with gcc, but that was just a test. But I switched now back to clang.

[czanik]

Yeah. As you can see from the list of packages I installed, I have a full Xcode installation and did not install compiler tools from Homebrew.

[Genfood]

I got it working, after a bit of fiddling around. But I don't know exactly what I did wrong, but it is working!

Steps I did:

• after a failed run, getting a clean repo again (I guess that was the main thing)
• Wasn't sure about if I have gmake and gm4 installed, but I had
• ...

Thx for your help.

Edit:
I just tried it again and can confirm that the problem was resulting from not including the openssl@1.1 path to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH variable, even if the PKG_CONFIG_PATH has been updated. After a cleaning of the repository, it worked.