Re: [gtk-osx-devel] Tools with Homebrew

[John Ralls <jralls ceridwen us>]

> On Oct 23, 2016, at 5:02 PM, philip chimento gmail com wrote:
>
> Hi list,
>
> The first bugfix release of Sierra, 10.12.1 is almost out so I'll soon be doing that yearly dance of 
> upgrading my Mac and Xcode, wiping my jhbuild tree, and rebuilding everything, fixing build bugs along the 
> way.
>
> I'm motivated to implement changes in gtk-osx-build that will make that dance a little easier and shorter!
>
> One thing that I spend a lot of time and frustration on every year is building those modules that aren't 
> really related to GNOME, like gnutls and the rest of the crypto stack needed to build glib-networking, etc. 
> One thing I've dreamed about for a long time is using Homebrew to install those, through jhbuild's 
> <sysdeps> facility. I don't think that's really realistic as such, for two reasons: 1) it's difficult to 
> get Homebrew to cooperate with install trees that aren't in /usr/local, and 2) there's no reverse lookup 
> for Homebrew packages by files that they provide [1].
>
> But, I think it would work fine to use Homebrew to install standalone build tools, such as pkg-config, xz, 
> bison, flex, etc. They wouldn't have to be in the jhbuild tree, just in the path, and they usually wouldn't 
> need to be included in an app bundle.
>
> This would save a lot of time and allow us to offload a lot of maintenance work to the much larger Homebrew 
> community, as well as help us keep up-to-date versions of those dependencies.
>
> It could be just an extra step in the instructions / scripts for setting up gtk-osx-build that installs a 
> bunch of Homebrew packages pre-emptively, or we could write a <sysdeps> thing that installs Homebrew 
> packages as needed when building modules.
>
> Homebrew works on 10.5 and up, although 10.5–10.9 are supported only on a best-effort basis, and you can 
> get it to work on 10.4 using a fork [2].
>
> Would there be any interest in this? Any problems that I'm missing?
>
> [1] http://superuser.com/questions/781693/how-to-determine-which-brew-package-provides-a-given-file
> [2] https://github.com/mistydemeo/tigerbrew

Phil,

I guess I don't see the point. All of what you're suggesting is in bootstrap.modules, and that takes only a 
few minutes to build on a recent (meaning capable of updating to Sierra) Mac. You can do it once to somewhere 
on the path (I put it in ~/.local) and it will be used for all of your other builds. The only wrinkles I get 
from that are that jhbuild doesn't know to look there for the xml catalog and a few packages (e.g. Guile) 
need to have libltdl in the bundle with them. Compared to the time needed to build even meta-gtk-osx-core, 
never mind a major program (never mind WebKit, which takes over an hour on a late 2013 Mac Pro) it's pretty 
trivial.

BTW, I've already done test builds on Sierra. No real issues.

Regards,
John Ralls