Hi Werner and all,
as others may have noticed, e.g. see
https://discourse.brew.sh/t/trouble-installing-ttfautohint/2084, it is currently impossible to successfully `brew install --with-qt ttfautohint`, at least on the latest macOS 10.13.6 and up-to-date homebrew.
The build fails with a configure error:
configure: error: Calling /usr/local/opt/qt/bin/qmake -spec macx-g++ failed.
I was eventually able to build by applying the following patch to the m4/autoroll.m4 file:
The patch tells qmake to use `macx-clang` instead of `macx-g++` as its spec. I'm not sure why the latter doesn't work any more... However, I can confirm that using the former does seems to fix the issue.
There is another thing that I had to do in order to successfully build. I had to modify the ttfautohint.rb formula make sure that the GNU sed is used instead of the (BSD?) version /usr/bin/sed that macOS ships with.
For some reasons, the same m4/autoroll.m4 is attempting to parse the output of qmake --version using some sed command that doesn't work with the Apple sed command, and thus the configure script is failing to detect the current Qt's version.
Here's my updated ttfautohint.rb formula which includes both the qmake -spec patch and the use of gnu-sed (also available via homebrew) instead of built-in sed:
One can install from this by downloading it locally then run:
$ brew install --build-from-source --HEAD --with-qt /path/to/local/ttfautohint.rb
Installing without --HEAD doesn't seem to work, probably because the patch is not applied in that case. I don't know. I'm not very familiar with homebrew.
Cheers
Cosimo