April DevTools beta; WebObjects 5.1 Test drive

[Craig R. Arko]

Both the new April Developer Tools beta (including gcc3 and AppleScript Studio 1.1) and a WebObjects 5.1 Developer eval are available for download from the Apple Developer Connection (connect.apple.com) site.

Note: (free) registration is required, and the site is likely to be swamped for a while.

Note 2: they are both big downloads (DT=231 meg, WO=145 meg).

[sao]

Craig,

Thanks for the tip, I downloaded the devtools this morning.

Regarding the 'fink installation', I don't know if upgrading to the 'Apr devtools' will fix things, but I'm quite sure that for at least some packages, it will break things.

For the moment I'm not aware of any 'official fink policy' about the upgrade.

I think that, unless you maintain Fink packages and want to test them with gcc 3.1, most users should stick with the Dec 2001 DevTools for now.

Also, for the average user if he doesn't use Project Builder/Interface Builder, the benefits probably will be minimal.


Cheers...

[Craig R. Arko]

Hmmm. The "What's New" PDF says gcc 2.95.2 is the default compiler. So I think you'd need to deliberately invoke gcc3 in the makefiles to use it.

I'll set this up and try building some fink packages and let you know what happens.

[xchanyazy]

I'm installing xv (an image viewer) through fink right now, after updating to the april dev. tools. Everything seems to be going fine, all of the usual cc statements are going by like usual.

cc -v gives -
[11:06][brandg ~] %cc -v
Reading specs from /usr/libexec/gcc/darwin/ppc/2.95.2/specs
Apple Computer, Inc. version gcc-937.2, based on gcc version 2.95.2 19991024 (release)


I'll post back if anything fails, but I haven't seen any warnings yet, much less errors.

EDIT: If I had any patience at all, I could tell you that it finished fine and works quite well - it finished literally 10 seconds after I posted this...

[Craig R. Arko]

Yup. I just built the latest rev. of WindowMaker through fink and all went well.

Since Apple does say in that 'What's New' PDF that gcc3 will be the default in the next DevTool full release (hopefully we'll get a date on that next week) I suppose the fink developers will have their hands full for a while. Maybe the XonX developers too.

[mervTormel]

Originally posted by sao
Regarding the 'fink installation', I don't know if upgrading to the 'Apr devtools' will fix things, but I'm quite sure that for at least some packages, it will break things.
i would be surprised and chagrin if a new tool set broke anything. there are myriad production make files that need to be supported and all the previous dev efforts should be supported without consequence.

or am i missing something? what would break? other than out of sheer beta bug?

[sao]

Craig and xchanyazy,

Thanks for the feedback. Anyhow it's devtools Public Beta. I saw that while the default compiler is still GCC 2.95.2, there is a beta GCC 3 included.


mervTormel,

I just read somewhere that there is an issue with the new gcc3, it seems it doesn't like -install_name when -bundle is specified, it will not build gaim, g-wrap and probably any package which uses GNU libtool to make a loadable bundle.

Probably upgrading will break things for some users. The line above suggests that this will be the case for some packages.


Cheers...

[sao]

Some reports from the fink-users lists about the April devtools:

-----------------------------------
I did a clean install of fink at about the same time as I installed the April Dev tools, and I had build problems with packages that never had any issues before. I'm in the process of uninstalling the April Tools and reverting to the December ones to see whether the same failures occur.

Alexander K. Hansen
Associate Research Scientist, Columbia University
Levitated Dipole Experiment
MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, 175 Albany Street, NW17-219
Cambridge, MA 02139-4213
-----------------------------------

Alexander: I'm also having problems with the April 2002 DevTools -xfree86-rootless in particular won't compile. If you succeed in uninstalling the April tools, please let me know how you did it.


Jeffrey S. Whitaker Phone : (303)497-6313
Meteorologist FAX : (303)497-6449
NOAA/OAR/CDC R/CDC1 Email : jsw@cdc.noaa.gov
325 Broadway Web : www.cdc.noaa.gov/~jsw
Boulder, CO, USA 80303-3328 Office : Skaggs Research Cntr 1D-124
-----------------------------------

Are you sure the problem is the dev tools?
Very little changed in the gcc2 stuff. The main changes were to project builder.

If you must remove it, there is a perl script to do so:

/Developer/Tools/uninstall-devtools.pl

-Ben Hines
http://homepage.mac.com/bhines/
-----------------------------------

Absolutely sure. Builds with Dec tools, not with April tools.
The problem occurs when building the app bundle for XDarwin. I don't know if project builder is involved.

Thanks Ben.

Jeffrey S. Whitaker
------------------------------------


Cheers...

[sao]

Conversations about April DeveloperTools and gcc3 I found on the fink list :

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If you are using gcc3 from the april dev tools, and you're having problems installing packages or making fink update-all, you can do the following:

(The same error also occurs when trying to build libxml2-2.4.21-2 bonobo-1.0.20-1 and glib with gcc3. Fink, itself, will not compile with gcc3.1.)

The solution is to run "gcc_select 2" to get any packages which make loadable bundles to build at the moment.

[chris@dale:~$]> ls -al /usr/bin/gcc
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 4 Apr 28 20:44 /usr/bin/gcc -> gcc2

if that says gcc is a link to gcc2, the compiler is probably not the
problem. if it says gcc3, just do "gcc_select 2" and that will set gcc2 up.


The problem can be fixed by patching libtool to not include the install_name flag when it gets the -bundle argument. Not too hard, but I was hoping that Apple would fix this to behave in the same manner as gcc2... which is to just ignore the argument when -bundle is specified...
----------


Cheers...