Re: [Gretl-users] Downloading, building and installing -gretl- 1.10.2 on Kubuntu Linux 15.04

On Tue, 22 Sep 2015, Berend Hasselman wrote: You're probably right, best to avoid MacPorts and Homebrew. As you assume, I'm following the do-it-yourself approach (and using what's supplied with OS X itself as far as possible). Thanks, Berend. Here's a first stab at an outline (more to follow). For now, I can offer a quick overview of a build process for Gretl.app. (I should be able to follow up with actual scripts, but it'll take a while to convert these from my cross-versions to native, and to test them on a Mac.) The overall strategy is: (1) create suitable trees in which (a) to build things and (b) to install things; (2) build a few required tools if they're not already on your system; (3) build and install the needed third-party libraries; (4) build and install gretl. In a bit more detail: (1) Start by creating a directory tree to hold the app bundle, as in sudo mkdir -p /Applications/Gretl.app/Contents/Resources sudo mkdir /Applications/Gretl.app/Contents/MacOS You could choose some location other than /Applications as the target, but in that case all binaries, dylibs and .so modules will probably have to be retargeted using install_name_tool. (Although that's not a big deal with a clever shell script.) Also create a tree under your $HOME for storing sources and building stuff. Just for example: mkdir -p ~/gretl-build/sources (2) Tools: you'll need (besides the Xcode command-line tools) a downloader (curl would do, though I prefer wget), an extractor for xz files such as unxz, pkg-config, and GNU gettext. At this point a strategic decision is required: do you want to build something closely resembling the Gretl.app that we distribute, or would you like to build an "all-in-one" kit which you could pass on to other people, hence enabling them to build gretl from source? In the former case you'd install the tools outside of Gretl.app (probably in /usr/local or somewhere under /opt); in the latter case, you could install them into the bundle filespace. But note that gettext is a special case: it comprises both build tools and a library, libintl.dylib, that's needed inside the app bundle. If you install gettext outside of the app (as I do) you then have to copy libintl into the bundle and "fix it up" with install_name_tool. (3) Dependencies, not provided by OS X: these include GMP, MPFR, fftw3, libpng, readline, the complete GLib/GTK stack with pango and cairo, gtksourceview and gtkmacintegration. You build these and install them into the app bundle tree. That means that when running their configure scripts you specify as --prefix /Applications/Gretl.app/Contents/Resources or wherever else you chose at step (1). (Alternatively, you can install them elsewhere, then copy everything that's actually needed into the app bundle tree, but that's a good deal more fiddly.) Note that a fair number of the gretl's dependencies are, fortunately, supplied by OS X, for example zlib, libxml2, libiconv and libcurl. Everything you, as builder, need for these libraries should be provided by the appropriate Xcode SDK, and everything the end-user needs should be provided by the OS itself. (4) If all has gone well to this point, it should be possible to configure the gretl sources to install into Gretl.app, build and install. There's no need for a fortran compiler unless you want to in addition to build X12A (or X13AS nowadays) or TRAMO/SEATS. As I said, I'll try to follow up with actual scripts (with configuration details) plus specification of package versions and a few patches for certain third-party libraries. Allin