Re: Building PSPP on a Mac

[Richard Brittain]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, Ben Pfaff wrote:

> > > Richard Brittain <address@hidden> writes:
> > >
> > > > Building PSPP on Mac OSX
> > >
> > > Also, John Darrington pointed out that recently a binary package
> > > for PSPP has appeared at:
> > > http://www.evolutionbeach.org/2008/10/stats-for-students-pspp.html
> >
> > This looks great, except that unless I'm missing something, it
> > contains only the executables (for i386) and no shared libraries.
> > Even if all the prerequsite shared libraries are assumed present,
> > don't we need libpsppire.dylib and libpsppwidgets.dylib too ?
>
> You may be right--I'm don't know much about OS X (never used it),
> and I didn't even download the packaging he provided.  If it
> doesn't work, it's probably a good idea to email the packager
> directly; he was very responsive to my own email.

I'll do that.  I know nothing about building Mac installers the 'proper' 
way,  but it occurred to me that I could probably build pspp with all the 
necessary run-time libraries in /usr/local/lib/pspp (once I've figured out 
what they are), and then it would be effectively 'stand-alone' and 
installable on a system without any macports tree.  The harder problem is 
installing on a system with out-of-date libraries which get found first.

On the libtool issue, I was wondering just what that gets used for.  I 
noticed that pspp creates its own (shell script) libtool, when configure 
is run.  OSX also comes with /usr/bin/libtool, inherited from the BSD side 
of things, which seems to be a functionally similar tool, but maybe not 
identical.  I found at least one explicit reference to "./libtool" -- I 
hope that no part of the build scripts pull in the system libtool 
accidentally.  I'll try rebuilding with the new tarball.  It did occur to 
me that it was odd that I needed to explicitly set the path to 
/usr/local/lib/pspp/*.dylib.

I also noticed that other pieces of Unix-derived software had installed 
miscellaneous .so files on my system, so pspp isn't unique in that 
regard.  The makefiles from Macports all create .dylib files though

--
Richard Brittain,  Kiewit Computing Services, 6224 Baker/Berry Library
                   Dartmouth College, Hanover NH 03755
Email: address@hidden