GnuCash OSX

[John Ralls]

On Jun 13, 2009, at 8:29 AM, Derek Atkins wrote:

> John,
>
> John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> writes:
>
>> On Jun 11, 2009, at 11:26 AM, Derek Atkins wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I noticed that you've done a lot of work on a semi-standalone
>>> GnuCash application for OSX.  Could you perhaps come over to
>>> gnucash-
>>> devel or the #gnucash irc channel so we can talk about setting up an
>>> OSX Build Server?  I'd like to work with you to integrate your osx
>>> work into the GnuCash source tree and then we can start to produce
>>> daily builds!
>>>
>>> Of course, we'd need to try to solve the gconf/glade/guile
>>> hardcoded-
>>> path issue somehow..
>>>
>>> Are you interested??
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> -derek
>>
>> Hello.
>>
>> I'm flattered, and interested. It didn't even occur to me that you
>> guys would be interested in making GnuCash portable to OSX.
>
> Absolutely!!  There's a huge call for that, and I personally would
> love to see it happen (even though I don't personally use OSX).
>
> [snip]
>> I'm presently have 3 patches to gnucash itself:
>> - Remove AC_CHECK_HEADERS of X11/Xlib.h
>
> Note that this is needed on Win32 as well, so we already have to
> have some code in there to deal with this.
>
>> - Modify the gnucash.in batch file template to set up the environment
>> correctly and start Dbus
>
> What about looking for glade files?
> But yes, this is definitely going to be an issue.
>
>> - Incorporate the gnucash menus into the Mac menubar.
>
> Sounds like a reasonable thing..
>
>> Only one of them (the last) is ready to go, but the other two only
>> need to be guarded so that they work only when building against gtk-
>> quartz.
>
> * nods *
>
>> I have written but not yet tested a patch to binreloc.c which should
>> allow binreloc to work correctly with a mac application bundle. I've
>> looked at dbus, and I see that its hardcoded path (to the machine-id
>> file) can be easily fixed up to look in the bundle as well.
>
> cool.
>
>> Are there more hard-coded paths that I don't yet know about?
>
> Maybe??  I'm not 100% sure how the win32 port works, but it definitely
> is 'portable' to some extent.
>
>> Derek, you mention daily builds. Do you have a mac available in your
>> build farm?
>
> I do.  Running 10.4.8.
>
>> Hmm, the other thing that you should be aware of is that the gtk-osx-
>> build setup doesn't at present do universal binaries. Dunno if that
>> matters.
>
> Honestly, I dont think it matters.  I think Intel-Only is fine.
>
> If someone wants a PPC version they can use our build scripts to build
> it themselves.
>
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
>
> -derek

Derek,

You do realize that this is working now and has been for well over a  
year, right?
And it isn't intel-only, it works just fine on PPC if built for that.  
It just isn't a universal binary, meaning that the same build won't  
work on both intel and ppc boxes. Until I can get the hard-coded paths  
ironed out, it's not easily movable from the machine it's built on  
anyway. (Though I was helping a guy build a couple of days ago, and he  
thinks he got around that by just building the whole tree into / 
Applications/Gnucash.app/Contents/Resources. I haven't heard back from  
him whether the installation actually transferred.)

Anyway, since you have a mac ready to go, the instructions are at http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/MacOSX/Quartz 
. Give it a try!

I don't think that the gnucash.in is really a problem. We just have a  
gnucash.osx.in and make can pick that up instead of gnucash.in when  
GDK_QUARTZ is true.

Anyway, on to details. The patches that are currently published are  
for 2.2.6, but you'd probably prefer to skip over that and patch  
current. I can prepare patches for that pretty easily. Do you prefer  
to get them here or on bugzilla? We're probably looking at a week or  
so before I get to it... I want to get the gtk-osx framework builds  
working a bit better and release the binaries before I switch back to  
working on gnucash.

Regards,
John Ralls