Mining Repositories: Installing CVSAnalY on Ubuntu

As part of my upcoming research into mining software repositories, I have been trying to install and use the CVSAnalY mining tool on Ubuntu. This very nearly did my head in, but I persisted and I have finally got it running.

This site was my starting point: https://projects.libresoft.es/wiki/cvsanaly/
The site has links to the downloads for CVSAnalY and its repositoryhandler library, as well as some installation instructions.

The first problem I came up against was installing the required respositoryhandler library. I was unable to install it on my Ubuntu installation by following the instructions. Having downloaded repositoryhandler-0.3.tar.bz2, here is what I had to do to get it installed:

$ tar xvjf repositoryhandler-0.3.tar.bz2

$ cd repositoryhandler-0.3

The next line in the instructions suggested I run ./configure, but there was no file named configure in the directory, so instead:

$ bash ./autogen.sh

The first time I tried this, it failed due a missing dependency: the autoconf package, so I installed the package:

$ sudo apt-get install autoconf

Trying autogen again, this time it fails with a missing automake package, but apt-get on automake says I have the latest version. I got round this one by downloading automake-1.9.tar.gz from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/automake/ and carrying out the following:

$ tar xvzf automake-1.9.tar.gz

$ cd automake-1.9

$ ./configure

$ make

$ sudo make install

So, back to the repositoryhandler-0.3 folder, and the following should work:

$ bash ./autogen.sh

This command generates a configure file, so we can continue:

$ ./configure

$ make

$ sudo make install

The end result of this is a compiled Python library, in my case a new repositoryhandler folder under /usr/local/lib/python26/site-packages. To get CVSAnalY to pick up this library, I had to move this folder to /usr/local/lib/python26/dist-packages.