Trying to build gnucash on Mac 2.9.2 using jhbuild: help?

[John Ralls]

On Mar 4, 2014, at 12:41 PM, Jeff Earickson <jaearick at colby.edu> wrote:

> John,
> 
> Thank you, the boiled down output of the webkit build is attached.  If you need the unedited output of webkit please let me know.  Has anybody else built gnucash on Mavericks?
> 
> I would like to be able to build the code on my Mac so I can begin to peek under the hood and maybe be useful to this project someday.  But as a UNIX guy, some of the excess baggage of Macs will befuddle me for a bit.
> 
> If I want to do the more classic "configure; make; make install" on a Linux host, what is the most commonly used platform?  I took a quick swipe at a gnucash build on a Redhat 6.5 system (minimal install) and came up with lots of missing/out-of-date graphical rpms.
> 

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That should have been fixed by a collection of commits I made last week, but I discovered a typo just now, so I’ve pushed a fix. Please re-run gtk-osx-build-setup.sh to update .jhbuildrc. You should perhaps pull the latest gnucash-on-mac as well, just to be sure. There are a bunch of patches on WebKit, so if it fails to build after updating, select "[6] wipe directory and start over". That will force applying all of the patches. 

I build Gnucash routinely on Mavericks, and though I don’t rebuild the whole dependency stack very often I just did so last week. 

MacOSX is FreeBSD with a pretty GUI. You should be right at home with the command prompt. Gtk-OSX just takes care of the pain of rounding up the zillion dependencies and saves you the trouble of typing ./configure && make && make install a zillion times, plus it’s set up with the right parameters and in the right order to get everything built.

The minimum RHEL for current GnuCash is 6, so it should have built OK once you got all of the dependencies. There’s a shorthand package command at http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ#Q:_I_heard_it_is_too_hard_to_compile_GnuCash.21, but of course RHEL 6 shipped with GnuCash 2.4, so what it loads in response to that is likely obsolete. You should be able to chase down the things that configure complains about and get it to build, but frankly I don’t think that anyone has actually tried. I usually use a Debian Testing or a Fedora 18 VM for cross-testing and for making the distribution tarballs, but I know that Debian Stable works, and I’m pretty sure anything after Fedora 14 does.

Regards,
John Ralls