[GRASS-user] Pros/Cons of different build strategies on OS X

[Michael Barton]

On Feb 5, 2008, at 2:57 AM, grass-user-request at lists.osgeo.org wrote:

> Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2008 23:22:17 -0800
> From: "David Finlayson" <dfinlayson at usgs.gov>
> Subject: [GRASS-user] Pros/Cons of different build strategies on OS X
> To: grass-user <grass-user at lists.osgeo.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<be6d1720802042322r356f9cf0s8dda9d939e029f50 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> I've got three brand new OS X Leopard Mac Pros that need the complete
> OS Geographic software stack built (GMT, GRASS, Image Magic, etc) but
> I have limited experience in OS X. For years on Debian/Ubuntu I just
> let the package manager (aptget) handle all the libraries and I only
> compiled from source the main programs that weren't in the repository.
>
> What do you do to build up all the libraries? Manage the dozens of
> required libraries manually? Fink? MacPorts? William Kyngesburye?
>
> I tried using MacPorts on a Tiger laptop and wound up downloading and
> compiling a brand new OS in /opt/local by the time I was done
> satisfying dependencies---complete with a duplicate version of GCC
> (SciPy wanted the new F95 compiler, I guess). That was a colossal
> effort, a complete waist of all the work Apple has done and introduced
> serious confusion between native OS X and X11 libraries which I never
> completely resolved. In fact, a few days ago, GRASS stopped compiling
> altogether because of an OpenGL problem...Anyway, I'd like to avoid
> that if possible. Any ideas?
>
> --  
> David Finlayson, Ph.D.
> Operational Geologist
>

David,

I use William Kyngesbury's frameworks for all GRASS dependencies.  
They work great and install in a snap. No fuss no muss. They are all  
updated for both 10.4 and 10.5.

If you want to save time, you can just download William's prebuilt  
binaries for GRASS 6.3 RC4. They are pretty close to what is in the  
trunk currently.

However, compiling is likewise easy. There is a Macosx section in the  
source code with a detailed README for compiling. There is a lot of  
information, but much is unnecessary if you just want to build for a  
single machine type. Cut out the example configure script, run it,  
make, and make install.

I haven't compiled on 10.5 yet. It has a few changes over the 10.4  
compilation. William has documented there but I haven't had the time  
to try them since I got my new iMac. So I'm still using the pre-built  
binaries on it.

Michael