Java 1.4 or greater (tick) Set the environment variable JAVA_HOME

 
 sp:~/greenstone3 spdegabrielle$ sudo emacs /etc/profile

My current /etc/profile

 #For Tomcat
 export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home
 export CATALINA_HOME=/usr/local/tomcat
 export JAVA_OPTS="-Xmx512M -Xms64M -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8"
</cdoe>
Ant 1.6.2 or later 
  * install XCode tools from the apple developer site
<code>
 ant -version
 Apache Ant version 1.6.5 compiled on September 12 2006

GDBM…

http://www.gnu.org/software/gdbm/gdbm.html follow the instructions at http://greenstone.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Compiling_Greenstone#Darwin.2FMac_OS_X you will also need to add the path to the gdbm.installed.path property (in build.properties)

svn co http://svn.greenstone.org/greenstone3/trunk greenstone3
 {wait for it...}
 cd greenstone3/
 ant prepare
 {read then agree to default build settings **y**}

hopefully:

 BUILD SUCCESSFUL
 Total time: 6 minutes 6 seconds

see if this works…

 ant install