Re: macOS 64-bit

[Marnen Laibow-Koser]

On Tue, Oct 8, 2019 at 2:38 PM Marnen Laibow-Koser <address@hidden>
wrote:

> Update: with wedding stuff, I haven’t had time to devote to this, but with
> Mac OS Catalina coming out this has become more urgent, as Catalina removes
> 32-bit support altogether.  I’m gonna try to spend some time on this in the
> next few days, and would welcome help from anyone interested.  I’ll post
> info for the MacStadium environment once I set it up.
>

I’ve been playing around with the MacStadium environment and understanding
more about the build.  Here’s what I think I know so far.  Please correct
me if I’m wrong on any of this.

* A straight compilation, by itself, won’t produce a suitable result. This
is because LilyPond depends on a bunch of dylibs that have to be installed
separately.  The MacPorts mdmg approach palliates this to some extent, but
it seems to do so by producing an *installer* which installs the dylibs to
appropriate places in /opt or elsewhere.

* Better would be a single well-behaved .app bundle, so that no installer
is necessary.  This is how Mac software is typically distributed, and it’s
how LilyPond has been distributed up to now.

* For that to work, the dylibs need to be moved into the .app bundle.
There are some tools like dylibbundler that might be able to automate this,
but the work has already been done in the GUB script that makes the 32-bit
Mac builds.

* That being the case, it seems (to my surprise) that the best course of
action would be to run GUB (with appropriate parameters and an appropriate
compiler) on Mac OS.  Fortunately, this doesn’t look like it will be
anywhere near as difficult as I’d been led to believe: we’ve got Python and
a POSIX environment, so it looks like most of it will just work.  Figuring
out the appropriate build options will probably be the biggest challenge.

A question, BTW: I notice that the file gub/config_cache.py has loads of
ac_cv_* settings for each build target.  I gather that these are Autoconf
config variables, and that I need to figure out the appropriate settings
for the 64-bit Mac build.  Is there an automated way to do this (say,
through Autoconf itself), or do I just have to write a C program that calls
sizeof and so on to find out the values?  (Sorry if this is a stupid
question; I’ve never messed around with Autoconf before.)

Best,
-- 
Marnen Laibow-Koser address@hidden http://www.marnen.org Sent from Gmail
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