[Tuxmath-devel] Mac OS X build of tuxmath

[Tim H. <ho...@wu...>]

Dear Martin,

Bill Kendrick suggested that you might be able to provide a bit of advice on 
producing a Mac build of tuxmath, one of the other tux4kids projects. I'm 
working on this because my daughters' school expressed interest in the 
program, and their computers are all Macs. I thought "how hard could it be?" 
and borrowed a Mac. Now I've discovered that "easy to use" = "whatever you're 
already familiar with" (which for me is Linux + KDE). If Macs didn't have a 
console, I'd be doomed. :-)

I've played with 2 ways of getting this build to work: the traditional Unix 
way (configure && make, etc) and using the Xcode IDE. While the Unix way 
_almost_ works, I've run into problems with both:

1. The Unix build works (I can get the application to run fine on the machine 
that it's compiled on), but my attempts to create a portable disk image 
(.dmg) have not yet worked---I can create the disk image, but it doesn't run 
when I try it on another computer. I _think_ I've now traced the core problem 
down to "Resources." tuxmath (like tuxpaint) loads a lot of files using a 
DATA_PREFIX macro, which by default gets set to /usr/local/share in the 
configure script. Do you know how one can get it to point to the Resources 
directory?

In preparation to create a universal binary, I have also switched to using the 
SDL "Framework" rather than the unix build of SDL. This has caused a problem 
in the configure script not being able to detect SDL. Since the sdl-config 
binary doesn't seem to be in the SDL.framework, I wonder if this will prove 
to be a fundamental problem?

2. Using Xcode, I set a bunch of flags (like the Library path, even though I 
imported the SDL Frameworks into the project, and DATA_PREFIX='"data"', which 
probably won't work but it's a hack to get it to compile). Eventually I got 
it to compile. Unfortunately, it just says "Bus error" when I run it from the 
shell (and nothing even as useful when I run it within Xcode).

While I've spent some time looking at your Xcode project, I can't see how you 
got this working: your Xcode project doesn't seem to set any of these flags, 
yet it (almost) compiles on my machine. (It can't find a file "trans/af.mo".)

Can you offer me any advice? I'm not sure which of these approaches is most 
likely to be profitable.

--Tim