[bt-devel] Mac build?

[Greg Hellings]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 6:31 AM, Eeli Kaikkonen
<eekaikko at mail.student.oulu.fi> wrote:
> The Mac frontier has been silent for a long time. Has Greg done anything
> for it? I don't expect anything, but it would be nice to have an
> enhanced Mac build for 2.4. I edited the Build wiki page a bit.

The way the chips have fallen with getting married have led to my wife
mainly using our Mac and myself mainly using our PC.  That, combined
with the fact that there seemed almost no interest in the Mac build
means I just haven't bothered to build on Mac.  I have only run into
two "wishlist" items for the Mac build and they both relate to size:

1) Apple does not distribute headers for its included ICU library.
One can install a community patched set of headers from Fink (which
would require a different build for every version of OS X) to build
against the included versions which are usually very lagged from the
upstream version or a much closer to updated version from MacPorts
which will allow a single binary for multiple versions of OS X, but
increases the install size.

2) Qt builds as a Framework on Macs.  The Framework includes both
release and binary versions, as well as additional files (some of the
headers, etc).  While it might be possible to remove some of the extra
files, every time I try to remove either the debug or release version,
the Framework complains about missing files.  I'm guessing this could
be circumvented bye listing the individual files to install into the
Framework directory and only including the appropriate files
(currently it's set to use a directory version of the INSTALL macro),
but I have yet to try that method.  Including both versions also
increases the install size.

Compared to an approximately 12-13MB download and 60ish MB install
size for the Windows version, the Mac version weighs in at a hefty 34
MB download size and installs to about 100 MB or more on-disk.  That
is significantly larger than any similar application I have installed
on my Mac.  With the native build of ICU, it shaves several megs off
the download size and maybe as many as 15 or more off of the install
size.  Installing only one version of Qt would also drastically bring
down both the install and download sizes.

Making a new build would be as easy as just borrowing the Mac for
20-30 minutes tonight.  However, I'm still running Leopard, so if
someone else has access to Snow Leopard and XCode, it is probably best
if they build it for compatibility's sake.  I'm not aware of any
outstanding problems with the build or package system on Mac other
than what I detailed above.  If anyone else is interested in giving
building a try, I'd be more than happy to work with you.  I know the
more avid Mac users on sword-devel had listed a few things they
thought which made the app "feel" less Mac like and more Unix like.  A
search back through my mailbox could dig up the thread, if someone is
interested.

--Greg

>
>  Yours,
>        Eeli Kaikkonen (Mr.), Oulu, Finland
>        e-mail: eekaikko at mailx.studentx.oulux.fix (with no x)
>
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