On Sep 25, 2009, at 2:19 AM, Peter W. Draper wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Sep 2009, Tim Jenness wrote:
>
>> Starlink autoconf no longer finds X11 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
>> Looking at the code for autoconf it seems that this is because
>> autoconf assumes that xmkmf is available but Apple have decided
>> that xmkmf is no longer needed so does not ship it as part of the OS.
>
> Actually I believe that xmkmf hasn't been in any OS X distribution,
> so this method has never been used. The AC_PATH_X macro looks for
> the X11 distribution using a fallback set of paths when xmkmf isn't
> available, clearly this worked in the past.
>
xmkmf was in the Leopard original X11 and the Tiger one. It has not
been in the Leopard dev releases and is completely gone in Snow Leopard.
>> Norman: do new autoconf versions handle this differently?
>
> Not really, they have a slightly updated fixed search path, but the
> change that might help is:
>
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=autoconf.git;a=commitdiff;h=b8c342a6c0794d9751d6a67907d7657a4499ad85
>
> that allows "dylib" as an extension for checking libraries. If that
> is so you wonder how this worked in the past, probably just that
> nothing special was required to link against X11.
That's why I was suggesting that xmkmf really was the issue.
Everything worked with xmkmf installed. I upgrade to snow leopard and
now X11 can't be located despite it being in a fairly obvious /usr/X11
location.
I just manually applied this patch to my system and everything now
works. Magic. So it has always been falling back to xmkmf. At least I
understand the problem now.
Luckily Norman has volunteered to update our autoconf system (I'll
commit a patch to our branch).
--
Tim Jenness
Joint Astronomy Centre
|