It would be wonderful if somebody who’s a mac head would write better docs on how to install on mac, troubleshoot problems, etc.
Not a mac head, can’t do it. Watching Sam Neaves struggle with it.
There are 4 options:
- Get the binary from the download page. Any Mac user should be able to deal with that. (Dis)advantages:
- Gui app provides menus for most common IDE tasks (as Windows GUI)
- The gui app has some problems with locale handling
- You can run the commandline version by adding the binary directory of the app to
$PATH - There are some issues for linking to foreign code and embedding.
- Use Macports (Dis)advantages:
- If you have Macports, easy to install and upgrade
- No gui app
- Use Homebrew (Dis)advantages:
- If you have Homebrew, easy to install and upgrade
- Default formula gives a rather limited installation. Don’t know the current status …
- Build from source (Dis)advantages
- Hard to setup prerequisites. See
scripts/macos-deps.sh, but do not expect this to work just out of the box. - Requires overall knowledge for dealing with CMake based sources.
- Allows building and configuring the way you want/need it, including debug builds.
- Hard to setup prerequisites. See
Graphics (XPCE for the IDE tools) always requires XQuartz to be installed as well. It works with all above setups.
For short, the binary is for people who want to develop pure Prolog programs (no foreign code, deployment, etc). Macports is a good choice for many people and actively updated and checked by Paulo Moura, Homebrew could be that as well, but this requires someone willing to create a good formula and update this for each release. Building from source is mostly interesting for users that want to develop on the system or have special build requirements for debugging, embedding, deployment, etc.
The limitations of the binary could be reduced, but this requires help. I’ve looked into the locale handling, but failed to understand how MacOS apps relate to the C runtime library locale handling.