Building binary packages for distribution

Fri, Apr 13, 2012 10:34 AM

Thanks, that is bad news.

I really don't want to ask our sysadmins to maintain a Leopard system 
for the very limited amount of package building we do, so we'll have to 
hope this suffices.

On 13/04/2012 18:05, Simon Urbanek wrote:

On Apr 13, 2012, at 11:36 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

I have hitherto used a Leopard system to build Mac binary packages
for distribution, but that system has died and we only have Lion
systems left (and the replacement hardware only runs Lion).  I'm
only concerned with building i386/x86_64 packages.

We saw problems with packages built on Snow Leopard which would not
run on Leopard, and the trick was to use -mmacosx-version-min=10.5
for compiling and linking.

It is only partially sufficient. The min version makes sure that the
Mach-O output is 10.5-compatible, but it will still happily use
Lion-only libraries when linking. You have to use 10.5 SDK (typically
via -isysroot) in order to make sure the linked frameworks and
libraries are actually compatible and present on Leopard.

I have at some point contemplated building the R releases and
packages on SL with the 10.5 SDK, but it is simply too fragile. There
are issues in details of dependencies, such as packages that use
configuration scripts to determine flags (like gsl-config) -- you'd
have to maintain a full system and worry about paths (linker/include
paths may work with -isysroot re-direction but any other paths
won't).

That said, it is possible to build R itself that way. I'd even argue
that it's better to simply create pre-drivers for compilers that
automatically add the corresponding -isysroot et al. and then exec
the compiler rather than setting the flags fully.

Does anyone know for certain if that suffices?  And does setting
the environment variable MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET to 10.5 do the
same thing?  (My man pages suggest so, but I don't trust Apple's
documentation to be current.)

AFAIK, yes, but it is equally insufficient. Apple has been warning
about the env vars for a while that they may get rid of them, but I
dont' think they did so far (there were more useful ones for managing
sysroot which I think they got rid of by now).

Best, Simon

Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

Building binary packages for distribution

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