Hey Gene,
I originally downloaded this version of fortune from here:
bsd fortune on versiontracker
If you compare the original to the modified version I think you'll see what's new and different. It had already been compiled in this distribution but I wanted to recompile it so I could put things into an accessible path. I also renamed the "datfiles" directory to "fortunes" because this is the traditional name for the fortunes data directory.
Strictly speaking this was a perfectly good version of the program but it didn't compile very cleanly under MacOS X. Lots of warnings about ambiguous if...else statements and a mis-declaration of the memset() function. I cleaned up the source code and added a 'make install' option in the Makefile.
Other things I've been able to get to compile under MacOS X include: joe, lynx, links, pine, DBI, and mod-perl. An awful lot of open source freeware is already set up to compile under Darwin/MacOS X so in a few cases there wasn't much to do. But today I was trying to get the xfdm window manager for X-Windows to compile cleanly and kept running into piles of dependencies. I finally gave up and settled for an older pre-compiled version.
If you have something you'd particularly like to get to compile I may be able to point you in the right direction, but generally I just keep tweaking until things start to work. It's been a lot of trial-and-error but it's starting to make a little more sense. Dependencies are tricky. When the 'configure' script can't find things where it expects them to be it can be pretty tough to sort out. There are two files on MacOS X that can sometimes help out:
/usr/share/libtool/config.guess
/usr/share/libtool/config.sub
If you copy these files into the distribution folder (where 'configure' lives) they can sometimes give hints to the script about how to carry out its business.
