Gnucash 2.6.8-1 and MacOS 10.11 - bad news

[John Ralls]

> On Oct 2, 2015, at 4:19 PM, Jeff Earickson <jaearick at colby.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have bad news for Gnucash users who upgrade to Mac OSX 10.11 (El
> Capitan).  The program will not launch.  In non-admin mode, you get the
> splash screen and the spinning beachball of death; you have to kill it via
> Force Quit.  In admin mode, you get this plus a black console window with
> nothing in it.  I upgraded my laptop to test 10.11 and quickly found this
> out.  My main system will remain 10.10 for awhile.
> 
> This may have something to do with the version of Xcode that it was built
> with (v 7 has had issues), or it may be something deeper.
> 
> FYI, another of my favorite programs, Totalspaces2 (
> http://totalspaces.binaryage.com/) has really
> fundamental problems because of 10.11's new System Integrity Protection.
> See http://totalspaces.binaryage.com/elcapitan for this author's unhappy
> recommendation.  I would not expect SIP to affect Gnucash, but you never
> know.

This has already been reported: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=755902
As noted there, GnuCash 2.6.7 does work. I think that probably rules out SIP being involved.

It’s very much down to the version of Xcode, or rather the compiler, used. For the release I used gcc-4.2.1 from Xcode 3.2.2, and the resulting code causes Guile to hang. The stack trace looks like it’s deadlocking in pthreads. I tested with
an Xcode 6 variant of clang and the 10.10 SDK and that works OK on El Cap but of course won’t on anything older than Yosemite. Next I tried gcc-4.8 built from source and the 10.5 SDK. That works on El Cap but has a linking issue with libgcc_s.1.dylib describe at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7885246/what-is-the-emutls-get-address-symbol. I’m now working on how to resolve that problem.

Regards,
John Ralls