==================================================================
Compiling Classic UMN Gopher on Modern Linux
Kelson Vibber, 2026-10-21, updated 10-22
==================================================================

When I started re-exploring Gopher last month, I was surprised to 
discover that Debian still ships a terminal-based gopher client! 
And it's the original University of Minnesota client, updated to 
keep compatible with modern Linux. And it's surprisingly 
user-friendly!

Source Code Repository:
https://github.com/jgoerzen/gopher

My Review:
gopher://gopher.kvibber.com/0/gopher/software/gopher-umn.txt

------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian
------------------------------------------------------------------

Just install it with apt.
```
sudo apt install gopher
```

If you want to compile it from source, 3.0.19 builds fine on 
Trixie without any changes. (Obviously you need to have gcc and 
the ncurses dev packages and so forth.)

------------------------------------------------------------------
Fedora, Arch (and probably other glibc distros)
------------------------------------------------------------------

Of course I wanted to run it on my main Fedora desktop and my 
Alpine cloud servers too, and was frustrated to find that it 
wouldn't even compile. On any of them.

I tried a bunch of things that didn't work, until I noticed that 
the latest Debian and Fedora releases ship with different versions 
of gcc.

Compatibility changes in gcc 15:
https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-15/porting_to.html

This turned out to be the issue: GCC 14 compiles C according to 
-std=gnu17 by default, and GCC 15 defaults to -std=gnu23. So I 
just had to tell configure to tell gcc to use the older C standard.

This worked on Fedora 44 and Arch (current as of October 2026),
both running bash, with the gopher-release-3.0.19 source:
```
export CFLAGS='-g -O2 -std=gnu17'
./configure
make
sudo make install
```

------------------------------------------------------------------
Alpine Linux
------------------------------------------------------------------

I haven't gotten it building on Alpine yet. I assume there are 
more musl/glibc differences to deal with. This gets it a little 
further into the build process, but it's still kicking back errors.
```
export CFLAGS='-g -O2 -std=gnu17 -D_GNU_SOURCE'
```
Setting it aside for now. I'll come back to it some other time.

------------------------------------------------------------------
gopher://gopher.kvibber.com/0/gopher/howto/gopher-compile.txt
gemini://kvibber.com/tech-tips/gopher-compile.gmi
https://kvibber.com/tech-tips/gopher-compile/