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1.7 Downloading and Installing

The package can be downloaded from several places, including:

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libidn/

The latest version is stored in a file, e.g., ‘libidn-1.25.tar.gz’ where the ‘1.25’ value is the highest version number in the directory.

The package is then extracted, configured and built like many other packages that use Autoconf. For detailed information on configuring and building it, refer to the INSTALL file that is part of the distribution archive.

Here is an example terminal session that download, configure, build and install the package. You will need a few basic tools, such as ‘sh’, ‘make’ and ‘cc’. 

     $ wget -q ftp://alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libidn/libidn-1.25.tar.gz
     $ tar xfz libidn-1.25.tar.gz
     $ cd libidn-1.25/
     $ ./configure
     ...
     $ make
     ...
     $ make install
     ...

After that Libidn should be properly installed and ready for use.

A few configure options may be relevant, summarized in the table.

--enable-java
Build the Java port into a *.JAR file. See Java API, for more information.
--disable-tld
Disable the TLD module. This would typically only be useful if you are building on a memory restricted platforms. See TLD Functions, for more information.
--enable-csharp[=IMPL]
Build the C# port into a *.DLL file. See C# API, for more information. Here, IMPL is pnet or mono, indicating whether the PNET cscc compiler or the Mono mcs compiler should be used, respectively.
--disable-valgrind-tests
Disable running the self-checks under Valgrind (http://valgrind.org/). Normally Valgrind does not cause problems and can detect some severe memory errors. If you are getting errors from Valgrind that are caused by the compiler or libc (possibly as a result of special optimization flags), you may use this option to disable the use of Valgrind.

For the complete list, refer to the output from configure --help.