Building GnuCash 2.2.2 on Mac OS X without Fink or MacPorts

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Alexander Sotirov <alex at sotirov.net> writes:

> 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.

If you're going through all this trouble, why not try to build
the gtk-macosx[1] project instead and get an application that runs
without X11?

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

Cool!  How hard would it be to take this script and then build
an installer?

> 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.

GnuCash has BinReloc support -- you could try to enable that?
Also, is this binary a fat binary?  Or does it build specifically
for either PPC or Intel but not both?

> 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.

It is indeed!   Thank you.

> Take care,
> Alex

-derek

[1] http://developer.imendio.com/projects/gtk-macosx

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available