[R-SIG-Mac] Building binary packages for distribution

[Prof Brian Ripley]

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