a t e v a n s . c o m

brew install groff - this contains the soelim binary, and whatever you are trying to build should now build correctly. Good luck!

Longer version: you may have encountered an error message like:

  Entering subdirectory man1
PAGES=`cd .; echo *.1`; \
	for page in $PAGES; do \
		sed -e "s%LDVERSION%2.4.44%" \
...
	done
/bin/sh: soelim: command not found
/bin/sh: soelim: command not found
...
/bin/sh: soelim: command not found
make[5]: *** [all-common] Error 127
make[4]: *** [all-common] Error 1
make[3]: *** [all-common] Error 1
make[2]: *** [all-common] Error 1
make[1]: *** [sbin/slapadd] Error 2
make: *** [gitlab-openldap/libexec/slapd] Error 2

I encountered this while trying to set up LDAP for local testing using the GitLab Development Kit. It downloads an older version of OpenLDAP, configures, compiles, and installs locally in a pretty sane way. Unfortunately, when it attempts to install the man pages for OpenLDAP, it tries to “glue” all the associated files together using soelim instead of something more universal. Since this was missing on my MacBook Pro, the install failed there.

My attempts to bypass man-page-compilation ended up with me digging through a lot of compile-time code and error messages, and it turned out to be a lot simpler to just get the soelim binary locally. The main barrier to this was my own StackOverflow / DuckDuckGo-fu; I didn’t come up with where the heck this soelim binary is. Ended up getting help from some awesome colleagues and finding the answer on Slack. Figured I should post this somewhere publicly searchable on the internet.

The groff package contains the soelim binary, so now you should have everything you need to find and start fixing the next dependency problem you encounter.