Re: macOS status

[Kirill A . Korinsky]

Greetings,

On Wed, 31 Jan 2024 17:10:32 +0100,
Camm Maguire wrote:
> 
> This alone should be reason enough to abandon Apple and its products.
> We are building an edifice on a foundation of sand which at any moment
> can be pulled from under our feet by an external commercial entity with
> its own interests.  I am stunned at the patience developers exhibit
> chasing this uncertainty.  There truly must be some killer app somewhere
> tying their hands.

Well, I'd like to move to some offtopic here and share a link to issue with
latest Xcode: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/68346

Long story short:
 - before Xcode 15.1 linker crashes on GCC produced code;
 - since Xcode 15.1 it works better, but new linker doesn't support -commons;
 - "classic" linker is deprecated and soon will be removed.

So, software should check which version of linker is used to remove unsupported
things like -commons, or switch to classic-ld when it required which was
introduced at Xcode 15.

To make things worst: macOS 13 support both Xcode 14 and Xcode 15. MacPorts and
Homebrew ships precompiled software to save tons of time, and some software like
mumps, scotch hardcoded used linker options.

So, if build farm of project uses macOS 13 + Xcode 14 it produces mumps or
scotch which works well on macOS 13 / Xcode 14, and fails on macOS 13 / Xcode 
15.
And opposite case also leads to the fails.

Unfortently the last few releases they had decrease quality of their software.

Frankly speaking your Catalina the stabler macOS for the last years.

(here I haven't speak about their VPN and different things related to privacy,
only about stability.)

> bizarre dysfunctional version of awk and sed which I am working around
> now.  Something called xcode-select which is asking for a software
> update, which I take from your wise advise I should never pursue.  No
> xlib/tcl, so no xgcl.  And clang cannot do gprof.  But I am happy to
> report I can build the standard system in this virtualbox, and can place
> a tarball somewhere if desired.  External gmp works.
> 
> If someone can instruct me how to get gcc (as opposed to clang) and
> xlib/tcl without breaking anything that would be great.

The easir way is MacPorts which works well on Catalina.

Installing it by hand is nightmare and requires a lot of time.

> gdb is asking to be 'codesigned' which rings some vague bell in my memory, so
> instructions appreciated here too.

Just use LLDB via sudo. It works quite well. A bit different commands, but
works. GDB is quite complicated topic.

-- 
wbr, Kirill