Linking Issues on MacOS X 10.6.5

[Mario Donick]

No, the angry smiley was not directed at you! It was directed at MacOS ...

Since several versions, the JEDI SDL libs are not needed anymore, they are included in FPC, and it is SAID that these units care themselves about the correct libraries.

It all works different on MacOS than on Linux or Windows, regardless of MacOS having a Unix core ...

[code_glitch]

Ah, now - wait wwwhaaaat? So is the problem compiling, or running sdl programs? I am totally lost.

[Mario Donick]

The problem is compiling SDL programs, for now. I did this once, some days ago, but then stupidly lost my whole setup and now don't remember how it was.

I then had several attempts, all with the SDL units provided by FPC (the JEDI-SDL units which I use on Windows and Linux never gave me any positive results on Mac), plus the SDLmain library which is found in the "devel-lite" folder of the SDL Mac Download. This "SDLmain" is required for developing, too.

1) The Frameworks only. The Frameworks are, I think, always needed on Mac, because in these are both the runtime and the development headers.

2) Frameworks + the classic Unix/Linux way: I compiled SDL from source, which lead to several libs with correct names in /usr/local/lib. The compiler found the libs, but they somehow did not contain the correct functions expected by the SDL units, and FPC complained about it.

3) Ports: Ports are similar to a package manager on Linux, but usually install everything in /opt/var/... This gave me the same negative result as 2)


According to the FreePascal wiki, with FPC 2.2.2 and 2.4.2, the 1st variant should be sufficient. But somehow ...

[code_glitch]

I hear that apt-get also works on mac. Would that mean that you could use t commands I did on ubuntu? I know a lot of mac users dont like it - but it might work as a last resort:

http://techline4teens.com/archives/81

seems to make a decent summary. I wonder if tHat would work? althoughbyou may need to use it to install all the apps you need for development. Just abother thought.

[Mario Donick]

Yep. This is the 2nd variant I mentioned (ports). Fink is another approach (but currently not working on Snow Leopard). Both work like apt-get. Hmmm... perhaps they also have a FreePascal port ... if this would be the case, I could use the Ports or Fink version of SDL and FPC.

If that worked, I only fear that the end users would need to install Ports, too ... or at least X11. I don't know if the casual Mac user, who would perhaps play my roguelike game, would do this.

However, I'll check this idea out.


Edit: Ok, there's no Ports version of FPC *sigh*

[JSoftware]

Some sdl wiki page mentioned that you needed to use Projectbuilder to build sdl properly(as frameworks). Did you do that?

And when you used frameworks+the unix way what was the problem then, precisely?

[Mario Donick]

No -- I simply did ./configure, make, make install, as mentioned in the MacOS readme of the SDL source. Also the FPC wiki says that you don't need to use the Framework, you CAN use the Unix way.

The generated libraries were stored in the right place, with the right names, but the linker complained that they were built for a wrong platform (although I explicitly told the configure script to build for i386 Intel Macs, not for PowerPC Macs).