I'm trying to build Premake5 on FreeBSD 10.1 from the sources. I eventually got it to compile by removing the "-dl" option and using gmake explicitly for the build. It built, but I can't get it to do anything but spit out the following error message. Doesn't matter how I invoke it. It crashes even on 'premake5 --help'.
Here's the message:
PANIC: unprotected error in call to Lua API (attempt to call a string value)
The code is buggy as all get-out. It starts by assuming linux is posix which is clearly not the case. They use linuxism all over the place so converting to posix is going to be quite a task, and until that is done it will never work satisfactorily on non-linux posix based systems.
The -ldl was obviously the first stumbling block. The next is in the function premake_locate_executable in premake.c. In this they are using the /proc filesystem which is a linuxism and since this fails on BSD they are falling back to some lua methods but they seem to be assuming that lua_tostring pops the corresponding value which it doesn't. Since their stack isn't balanced in this function the following lua_call is trying to call the garbage they've left on the stack rather than the function they intended.
Even after I fixed this issue they use getconf _NPROCESSORS_ONLN to get the number of cores to multi-job the make build but they don't actually check that this call succeeds (which it doesn't outside of Linux and MacOSX).
After fixing this issue I then ran into the problem that their makefiles aren't regular make, but GNU-make, so I had to change to using gmake to try and build.
From that point it just came unravelled because none of the premake files in the contrib directory are configured for BSD despite it being one of the legal configuration targets (i.e. it doesn't default to linux) and so there is no configuration for those components.
TLDR: BSD is not a supported platform