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

GRASS GRASS user
1

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

Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2008 23:22:17 -0800
From: "David Finlayson" <dfinlayson@usgs.gov>
Subject: [GRASS-user] Pros/Cons of different build strategies on OS X
To: grass-user <grass-user@lists.osgeo.org>
Message-ID:
  <be6d1720802042322r356f9cf0s8dda9d939e029f50@mail.gmail.com>
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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