Xpce on mac

I tried to see how the whole thing works on my Mac, and it turns out it doesn’t work too well.

First, what works:

I am able to compile from source after installing all dependencies, including gcc, using homebrew. I am able to tell cmake to do what I mean, like this, from inside the build directory (see SWI-Prolog -- Installation on Linux, *BSD (Unix)):

cmake -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/usr/bin/gcc \
      -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/bin/g++ \
      -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="$HOME"/bin/swipl \
      -DSWIPL_PACKAGES_JAVA=OFF \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
      -G Ninja ..

However, now, when I start the graphical editor or debugger, I am getting never seen before warnings and the text is somehow very wide (every character is followed by about two white spaces?).

?- edit(aggregate_all/3).
true.

?- XPCE Xt warning: locale not supported by Xlib, locale set to C
Fontconfig warning: ignoring UTF-8: not a valid region tag

Some googling tells me that many projects suffer from similar issues. I can’t be now bothered to figure out how to fix it :frowning:

This is annoying because I had managed to get it to work after some effort, but now it is broken. I suspect the MacOS upgrades.

Altogether the development experience on a (pretty modern) Mac has been crap. Every time the OS forcefully upgrades itself (every other week), a lot of stuff is broken (like, git doesn’t work) and I need to do this one trick:

xcode-select --install

I won’t complain more, but depending on what you are doing, it might indeed be easier to just do your development on a developer-friendly OS :slight_smile:

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