Re: Swarm objc and OsX/Darwin OS status

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "AP" == Perrone Alessandro <address@hidden> writes:

AP> I am trying to compile Swarm on MacOSX/Darwin OS.  I have
AP> installed on my imac the two OS with the development tools.  I can
AP> compile all the "needed software" except the libffi (the configure
AP> script reports that the package is not ported to this platform).
AP> Acqurlly I have no much time to dedicate to the porting of libffi.
AP> Is it possible to compile Swarm without libffi? 

There is a PPC version of avcall, that Ralf has kindly tested and says
works, at least on LinuxPPC.  However, you will find there are deeper
compiler problems in Apple's hacked-up GCC that can't feasibly be
avoided.  Worse, standard GCC 2.95.2 can't be built on MacOS X because
Apple has chosen not to direct resources at a proper port of
GCC/binutils to their (quite dated) Mach O executable format. 

On the bright side, X11 works fairly well now, although you have
to retrofit the Public Beta system headers in order to build a usable
X11 port.  Just getting a decent X11 up and running will take half a
day by itself.  (Although maybe there are binaries by now -- I had to
build from source code.)

Listen, I'm not just being peevish when I said that a port of Swarm to
MacOS X is not easy.  You'll have to disable a lot of code in Swarm and
you'll end-up with something that's not really usable.

                  ==================================
   Swarm-Support is for discussion of the technical details of the day
   to day usage of Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp.
   [un]subscribing), please send a message to <address@hidden>
   with "help" in the body of the message.