entrez-direct packages the wrong binary in build pl256_1

[ialbert]

It appears that the xtract subcommand of entrez-direct was rewritten from Perl to GO. When installed on MacOS Catalina invoking the xtract command will will fail with the error:

cannot execute binary file 

Edit:

The installation used to work correctly before. I noticed that older installation of the same tool do work. Doing conda install entrez-direct=11 packaged the correct binary when the build was pl526_0 but delivers the wrong binary if the build is pl256_1

The current version of the xtract command contains the information on the download locations:

#!/bin/sh
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin
export PATH
osname=`uname -s`
cputype=`uname -m`
case "$osname-$cputype" in
  Linux-x86_64 )           platform=Linux ;;
  Darwin-x86_64 )          platform=Darwin ;;
  CYGWIN_NT-* | MINGW*-* ) platform=CYGWIN_NT ;;
  Linux-*arm* )            platform=ARM ;;
  * )                      platform=UNSUPPORTED ;;
esac
compiled=$0."$platform"
if [ -x "$compiled" ]
then
  exec "$compiled" "$@"
else
  echo ""
  echo "Unable to locate xtract executable. Please execute the following:"
  echo ""
  echo "  ftp-cp ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov /entrez/entrezdirect xtract.$platform.gz"
  echo "  gunzip -f xtract.$platform.gz"
  echo "  chmod +x xtract.$platform"
  echo ""
fi

[ialbert]

I tracked down wich xtract is being installed. It appears that upon installation the following repositroy is downloaded:

https://conda.anaconda.org/bioconda/noarch/entrez-direct-11.0-pl526_1.tar.bz2

this contains the wrong binary.

[ialbert]

The problems have been solved. Thanks @dpryan79