Development on Mac Leopard (10.5.5)

[David Reiser]

On Oct 26, 2008, at 6:44 PM, Charles Day wrote:

> What is the current state as far as doing GnuCash development on  
> Leopard? I
> now have a spiffy new MacBook Pro at my disposal, so I am trying to  
> shift
> away from developing on XP. I read the FAQ but the information sounded
> enough out-of-date that I thought I should ask for a update to  
> double-check
> before diving in.
>
> 1. Is it readily possible to do GnuCash development, compilation, and
> testing work from within Leopard, via macports or fink or otherwise?

I always have one or more fink gnucash installs around plus gnucash  
trunk. I found the best way to make sure I had all the dependencies  
was to install the latest fink gnucash ('fink install gnucash2'), and  
then set up an /opt install of trunk (/opt is not in my path) for  
testing/development:

guile18-build PERL_PATH=/usr/bin/perl PERL=/usr/bin/perl LIBRARY_PATH=/ 
sw/lib CPATH=/sw/include ./configure --enable-error-on-warning -- 
enable-compile-warnings --prefix=/opt/gnucash-svn --enable-debug -- 
enable-doxygen --enable-ofx  --enable-hbci --with-dbi-dbd-dir=/sw/lib/ 
dbd

the guile18-build is a fink-installed bit that just sets environment  
stuff to find fink's guile. I force the system perl because there were  
some issues switching back and forth between fink's and the system's.  
But I still use fink to install finance-quote...

There's some grumbling about that the latest gtk+ has broken gtkhtml  
and evince in fink (making it hard to install gnucash2). But others  
have apparently succeeded.

There's also one report that finance-quote 1.14 was causing a problem  
(didn't for me). I'll try to get f-q 1.15 committed tonight.

When I got started, it was easier for me to figure out fink than  
macports. Fink will also keep old shared libraries around so as not to  
break already compiled stuff. If you're careful about general port  
updating, that may not be a problem for you.

>
> 2. Is it just easier to do the work in Linux or XP running in a  
> virtual
> machine, e.g. vmware fusion or parallels? (I would rather not have  
> to dual
> boot.)

Maybe Linux in a virtual machine, but I'd be really surprised if XP  
was easier than native Mac -- OS X is a unix variant after all.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Charles

Dave
--
David Reiser
dbreiser at earthlink.net