[MACTCL] MacOS 10.15 Compile: Role of /usr/local/bin

[Kevan H. <ha...@br...>]

Greetings,

My efforts to compile TclTk from sources were failing on MacOS 10.15 Catalina with the following error:

ld: warning: ignoring file <snip>libtclstub8.6.a, building for macOS-x86_64 but attempting to link with file built for unknown-unsupported file format ( 0x21 0x3C 0x61 0x72 0x63 0x68 0x3E 0x0A 0x2F 0x20 0x20 0x20 0x20 0x20 0x20 0x20 )
Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:

There is no copy of libtclstub8.6.a on my machine other than the one newly-produced by the build. So I interpret this error message to mean that the linker cannot resolve references in libtclstub8.6.a because the linker has found the wrong files to resolve those references. I encounter this error when my path is set to the following:

/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

But not with any of the following paths:

/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
/usr/bin:/bin

I conclude that there are files in /usr/local/bin that are hijacking the link. With path fixed, I get MacOS 10.9+ build on my 10.15 machine, and it behaves well.

Best, Kevan

-- 
Kevan Hashemi, Electrical Engineer
Physics Department, Brandeis University
http://www.bndhep.net