Configure.pl requires parrot_config and gen_makefile.pl to be installed, but makes no mention of this in the README. The former is installed with parrot's 'make install' but the latter only with 'make install-dev'. I recommend a change like the following:

--- README (revision 14) +++ README (working copy) @@ -16,6 +16,13 @@

$ svn checkout http://pynie.googlecode.com/svn/trunk pynie

+You'll need to have the parrot dev tools installed. In your +parrot source tree, do: +
+ $ perl Configure.pl --prefix=/usr/local # or your preferred place + $ make + $ sudo make install-dev + Once you have checked out a copy of pynie, build it as follows:

$ cd pynie

Pynie's configuration process is currently a very simple script, and needs more advanced checks for dependencies. We'll be moving this in the next few weeks, probably to autoconf.

Is it possible to build pynie on an Ubuntu box which has apt-get install parrot only? I can't find any parrot_config (there doesn't appear to be a parrot-dev package or anything in aptitude).

To answer my own question: just apt-get install parrot is not enogh for pynie. You need to downoad the source and install-dev it.

The version of Parrot currently in Ubuntu is very old. Ubuntu packages are available, see https://launchpad.net/~parrot-dev/+archive/ppa for instructions on adding the Parrot launchpad package archive to your sources list. After that, you'll be able to run 'apt-get install parrot-dev', and build pynie without building and installing Parrot from source.

Hopefully we'll have Parrot 1.0 or 1.4 packages included in Ubuntu 9.10. (1.0 was released too late to get into 9.04.)

Except it seems to be called parrot-devel, not parrot-dev.