[GNC-dev] Compiling Gnucash on MacOS - not for the faint of heart...

[Mike Alexander]

> On Jul 1, 2018, at 11:23 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> 
> Last question first, bash and emacs. ISTR Mike Alexander uses vim and emacs.

Sorry for the delay, I’m a bit behind on EMail

My GnuCash environment is probably unique, or at least was until recently.  I’ve been too busy to update things for the current release so for the last few weeks I’ve been using the prebuilt binaries.  I hope to get back to my previous setup soon, however.  This means running the X-Window version on MacOS instead of the native Quartz version.  GTK3 is better than GTK2, but even with it I find the support for Quartz deficient in many ways.  For example there is almost no support for any accessibility features such as Voice Over.  Since I’m partly blind I depend on this and find apps that don’t suport it difficult to use.

I use a combination of MacPorts, BBEdit, and XCode to work on GnuCash.  I use MacPorts to install the dependencies.  This works fine if you’re using the X-Window version since that’s what MacPorts does for a living.  I’m not sure MacPorts has a quartz build for everything GnuCash needs for a dependency but it probably would be possible to add any that are missing.  It’s hard to have MacPorts build both X-Window and Quartz versions of things on the same machine so you really need to pick one or the other.

I use BBEdit to look at and edit the source and to do the builds.  I used to use XEmacs (never vi)  a lot back when I worked on Unix and Windows systems, but since XEmacs is essentially dead now and BBEdit is a very good replacement I use it.  I do the builds in a BBEdit worksheet.  If any of you have been around Macs long enough to remember MPW, a BBEdit worksheet is much like an MPW worksheet.  It’s an editable text window with a shell attached so you can execute shell commands and have the output appear in the window.   This is somewhat of an acquired taste, but I like it for some things.

I also have an XCode project (which is in git) but it is not used for building (the build script is /usr/bin/true).  It is useful for debugging since XCode provides a quite reasonable GUI for lldb.  I’ve got most of the source files in the project (although it’s probably not up to date right now) so XCode can find them.  I point the binary at the copy I build in BBEdit.  Then I can use XCode to debug GnuCash.  This works surprisingly well.

When I just  want to run GnuCash I invoked it from the terminal using a bash script I’ve put in ~/bin/gnucash.

This is admittedly an odd setup, but it works for me.

         Mike