Re: build trouble on MacOS 10.5

[Ben Abbott]

On Dec 21, 2009, at 11:57 AM, Michael D Godfrey <address@hidden> wrote:

> I have been looking through the Mac OS thread.  It is
> obviously not simple to get Octave to build on a Mac.
> 
> So, I have 2 suggestions:
> 
> 1. Someone should consider a "Howto" for
>     building on a Mac.  This should have a list of
>     the minimum set of additional stuff needed.  Not
>    everyone will want to load a lot of stuff from Fink
>    or Macports into their machines.  These sources
>    can have some negative side effects.
>    
> 2. I might be better to focus on 10.6 since by the
>     time the current development system become a
>     release most people will be on 10.6 at least.
>     In addition, 10.6 does have significantly more 
>     "modern"  unix stuff.  Of course, they forgot sed,
>     and other useful items.  But, they have (if you
>     remember to install the "extras" from the install
>     DVD):
> 
>            required               OSX 10.6
>     Automake >= 1.11          1.10
>     Libtool >= 2.2.2          2.2.4
>     Autoconf >= 2.62          2.61
> 
> In any case, a working build procedure for 10.6 will
> have a longer useful life, and is likely easier.
> 
> In my own case, I installed 10.6 shortly after it came out,
> but had to revert to 10.5 due to incompatible apps.
> (This was trivially easy using the Time Machine.)
> 
> However, in the meantime everything I need has been fixed, so 
> all my Macs are on 10.6 and, for me, it is a substantial
> improvement.
> 
> If I can find some time, I will try building on my machine.
> (My quick attempt stopped at no sha1sum, and my "quick fix"
> failed.) :-( 

I like the idea of the howto.

AFAIK, no one has yet been successful building the current development sources 
on Mac OSX 10.5 or 10.6. However, it appears that 10.5 will soon be successful. 
Why 10.6 is more trouble, I don't know. Maybe it is due to the 32/64bit thing, 
or maybe its just that I'm in over my head.

Regarding sha1sum, you'll need gnu's coreutils.

        http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/

If you don't have it installed already, you'll discover you also need gnulib

        http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/

If you don't have that, you can just install git and the build process will 
download and build gnulib for you.

        http://git-scm.com/download

Without a package manager (Fink or MacPorts), it will be a hassle to install 
and maintain all the dependencies, but I agree this should no be a requirement, 
but an option.

I recall that Thomas Triechl placed the shell scripts he uses to produce the 
source-forge binaries available. There are old versions at the link below.

        
http://old.nabble.com/Creating-apps-for-MacOSX,-especially-octave.app-td10670061.html#a10670061

These may be useful in automating the build process in the absence of a package 
manager on Mac OSX.

Ben