What's involved in maintaining the Mac OSX build?

Hi, thanks for your message!

Maintaining binaries for a platform just means producing and testing installable packages when new versions are released. This looks simple, but actually requires some knowledge in the way Mac packaging works (which is, honestly, a pain).

Tagaini indeed uses Qt and the produced packages must therefore include the Qt libraries. Lately Qt added a little program called macdeployqt that does the job but there is still a lot of manual work to do in order to obtain a working package. If you look at the scripts/buildosxreleases.sh file under the source tree you will see what this means.

Technically, I can produce binaries myself, but am not at all a Mac user. I just happen to have a Macbook on which I installed Linux and kept a small OSX partition - which is still at version 10.4, which won't be supported by Qt anymore from 4.7. As I don't use it otherwise I have no plan to upgrade, and anyway I think producing nice packages is a work better done by a system enthousiast.

I have never tried building Tagaini from source so I am not surprised if it does not work. I do it using make, with the following sequence of commands:

  $ qmake -spec macx-g++
  $ make

You can try it on the latest 0.2.396 beta source which has just been released today. No Mac binaries for the moment. ;)

Once you get a binary working, you can study the buildosxreleases.sh script file in order to see how the final image is produced.

So if you have a Mac system with the Qt libraries installed, you can become the official Mac maintainer and I would be very grateful to see that happen. Experience in C++ and Qt is not required but may help in case of problem, what seems more important to me is some knowledge about the tools involved in the packaging process.

Thanks again for your interest,
Alex.

Thank you for the information Alex. Sorry, to report in so late, had a lot to do. Today I was trying to get a build done on Mac OS X. So far I ran into the problem building the pysqlite DB (https://bugs.launchpad.net/tagaini-jisho/+bug/492138) and was unable to fix it. Besides that the build process works nicely. As soon as I got this ironed out and feel comfortable with the process I'd be glad to start maintaining the Mac binaries.

Regards,
Thorsten

Sorry for the late reply.

Are you trying with the latest Git source? On my machine I am able to
get builds by following the procedure in the buildosxreleases.sh
script (in the "scripts" subdirectory).

About maintaining the Mac binaries, an important thing I forgot to
mention is that you would also be responsible for troubleshooting when
users encounter problems with them. I hope you are fine with this
point.

I'll try the latest Git source in the following days, sorry have been rather busy lately. Troubleshooting would be ok.

Still trying to get a successfull buid using the latest Git sources ... hanging around the builddb.py problem. Got part of the problem fixed but now another one pops up:

ImportError: dlopen(3rdparty/pysqlite-2.5.5/install/pysqlite2/_sqlite.so, 2): Symbol not found: _sqlite3_enable_load_extension

Tried to build from scratch, think the problem is somewhere with the linking of the QtCore ... will check that the following days and keep you updated.

Happy holidays.

I suggest you don't worry too much with that for the moment. The building process is clearly broken - this is the real problem. Fixing it is one of my top priorities and I'm considering several options at the moment. Since the process will be changed (hopefully for the better), you should not waste your time with the current one.

I'll keep you informed when things evolve.

Just a "up" for Thorsten in case he is still interested in building Mac binaries - building from source has now become much easier, so if you don't mind I'd love if you could give it a try!

Thanks for the info. I'll give it a try this week and get back to you.