[Openmcl-devel] CCL on SnowLeopard?

[Gary Byers]

On Mon, 19 Oct 2009, Charles Martin wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 13:21, Gary Byers <gb at clozure.com> wrote:
>
>> "dying horribly" = C compiler can't find header files, gets confused,
>> and generates dozens/hundreds of largely meaningless error messages
>> detailing that confusion; this is all a symptom of failing to install
>> the optional 10.4 XCode support.
>>
>> Or, if you prefer, it's a symptom of our trying to continue to support
>> 10.4 while Apple's starting to phase that out.  When we asked last spring,
>> the replies that we got indicated that few people still cared about 10.4,
>> but one large institutional user had a large installed base of 10.4 machines
>> that they said that they couldn't afford to upgrade so we decided to leave
>> it in.  In hindsight, offering to hold a fundraising drive so that they
>> could afford to upgrade those machines might have been a better choice,
>> and the situation with 10.4 support will probably get worse over time.
>
> Not to be cranky or anything, but wouldn't it be even cheaper yet to
> modify the download and install pages to say, in some vivid and
> unambiguous fashion "10.4 support code for XCode is required"?
>
> Maybe even include a line in the compile that looks for the apparently
> missing header file and says "error: XCode 10.4 support not
> installed."?
>
>

Well, it's certainly true that people can't or don't read the SystemRequirements
page on the web site which notes this requirement in bold type, and it's
probably not too hard to modify the Makefile(s) to complain about the missing
headers so that it fails a little more cleanly.