#269 Crash of D9 on Mac OS X 10.8.5
Hi,
I am trying to use SciDAVis D9 on a mac running OS X 10.8.5. The program opens, but as soon as I try to create a graph or open an older project (from D8) it crashes. I am attaching the full crash report, but I think that the critical issue may be this:
Dyld Error Message:
Symbol not found: ___exp10
Referenced from: /Applications/scidavis.app/Contents/MacOS/libqwt.5.dylib
Expected in: /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
Google searching on this error finds similar problems with other programs when run on OS X 10.8 or earlier, and that there is a compiler option -mmacosx-version-min that may be relevant.
I'm afraid that I don't have much experience building applications this complicated myself, and I don't have time to try it now. But, I am happy to do some testing if given directions.
Thanks,
David Goldenberg
It's inevitable something like this would happen. I have access to Snow Leopard and Yosemite. My preference would have been to do a 32 bit Snow Leopard build for maximum OS support, however the macports distribution no longer builds on Snow Leopard, so now I can only produce Yosemite builds of SciDaVis.
None of this prevents you from building SciDaVis from source code on Mountain Lion whether using mac ports or one of the other Mac distributions, or just building all dependent packages from source code. I'm more happy to help you if you get stuck, but I don't have enough time to do a supported package for older OS releases :(.
Your other alternative is to do what Apple would like you to do, and upgrade to the latest OS release.
Thanks for your quick reply. If I get a bit of time, I will try to build it from MacPorts. If I were to do that, would the build work on its own, or would it need other things in MacPorts to run?
Also, can you tell me how much difference there is between D8 and D9? I gather that D9 is a bug-fix release, but how significant are those fixes?
Thanks,
David
On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 04:23:14PM +0000, David Goldenberg wrote:
Primarily, SciDaVis needs Qt, Qwt, Qwtplot3d, muparser and GSL. Python
is an optional prerequisite package, which you can take it or leave it. You
need the correct versions of Qt and Qwt, which is version 4 and
version 5 respectively. With macports, installing these packages is
usually a simple matter of typing something like (eg)
"port install qwt5"
"port search qwt" will give a valid list of install targets.
macports will ensure the correct prerequisites for the install target
are also built and installed (it can take a while for all this to
happen, but you can go off and have a coffee or something while that
takes place).
You can also install these packages directly from the source code. In
that case, you need to manage the prerequisites manually. Fully
installing everything from source code is quite a time consuming and
tedious process as you discover what the prerequisites are by looking
through the entrails of compiler diagnostic messages (be warned), so
using something like mac ports where it works saves a lot of time and effort.
There are at least two other systems for distributing open source
software, Homebrew and Fink. I chose Macports because it seemed the
most comprehensive, but you're certainly welcome to try the other two
to see if they work better.
The final executable will depend on dynamic libraries (aka "dylibs"),
as well as resources such as fonts and icons. If you get it built on
your machine, then expect to run on that machine, but not run on
another mac that doesn't have those packages installed. To make an
installable package that runs on any mac (ie the one I distribute)
requires collecting all these various libraries and resources into a
single package. I have various scripts that encode the hard-won
knowledge of how to do this - if you need to do this, we can come back
to it, but probably for your purposes, this won't be necessary.
You could also check the commit history, but that involves checking
both the subversion repo on SourceForge and the one on Github, as we
changed the code location during this iteration.
FWIR, there were about 2-3 critical bugs (crashes that occur in
specific circumstances), some fixes for Origin support and probably
most importantly, a fix for non-English translations being loaded.
Whether any of these things are important to you is another matter :).
It'll be bug fixes for the forseeable future. I don't (yet) ascribe to the
"aspect-oriented" programme the initial SciDaVis team were pursuing,
either because it hasn't been explained terribly well to me, or the
implementation of it in SciDaVis sucks big time. Unless someone else
comes along with a profound interest in taking SciDaVis to a different
place, that is unlikely to change.
--
Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpcoder@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au
Russell,
Thanks for all of your comments. I have managed to install D9 on OS X using MacPorts. There was a bug in the MacPorts script, but the people there quickly fixed it, on New Year's day, no less.
Thanks,
David
This is now fixed, as of a release or two ago. The trick is to configure mac ports to have a min MacOSX version much less than the system being built on, which is not the default. See http://www.hpcoders.com.au/blog/?p=100 for details.