Building GnuCash 2.2.2 on Mac OS X without Fink or MacPorts

[Alexander Sotirov]

I successfully built GnuCash 2.2.2 and a minimal set of dependencies on
Mac OS X without the use of Fink or MacPorts. The only build requirement
is to have the Apple XCode tools. It should be possible to package the
output of the build and run it on any OS X system as long as the user has
X11 installed.

The build process is automated with a shell script. The hard part was
getting all dependencies (78MB of tarballs) and applying the right
patches to make them build on Leopard. Hopefully some of these patches
will find their way into the upstreat packages and the build process
will be simplified even further.

I tested the build process on 10.4 and 10.5 with PowerPC and Intel CPUs.

The detailed instructions, build script and patches are at
http://a.sotirov.net/2008/building-gnucash-on-mac-osx/

You are welcome to put them on the wiki if you think it would be useful. Here's
the short version:

  curl -O http://a.sotirov.net/code/gnucash-osx/gnucash-osx-20080107.tar.gz
  tar xfvz gnucash-osx-20080107.tar.gz
  cd gnucash-osx-20080107
  ./download.sh
  ./build.sh

If the build is successful, GnuCash will be installed in /Applications/GnuCash
and can be started by running /Applications/GnuCash/bin/gnucash

The current build does not have printing, OFX, HBCI or quote support because
I don't use them and I tried to keep the dependencies to a minimul. Adding
these should not be too hard.

The build process hardcodes the install path in all libraries and the GnuCash
binary will not work if the directory is moved. This is probably the biggest
obstacle to turning this into a binary OS X distribution. Suggestions on how
to deal with this are welcome.

Another issue is that the /Applications/GnuCash directory contains a lot
of files installed by the other packages we built that are not needed for
GnuCash. It would be good to figure out exactly what is needed and delete
the rest, because right now the directory is about 200MB (a lot of that
are the locale files for GnuCash and the rest of the Gnome libraries).

I would really like to see a binary distribution for OSX, and hope that
this is useful as a first step towards this goal.

Take care,
Alex
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