Installation instructions for different versions of Mac

[mockdeep]

I spent 2 hours last night trying to help someone get ImageMagick and RMagick installed and running on his Mac (OSX 10.9.4), and still failed. We spent a lot of time playing around with the solutions here and eventually gave up. It would help to have clear instructions in the README for setting up the latest compatible version of ImageMagick on different versions of Mac, since every time I try to help someone get set up I inevitably spend hours googling around and trying one random solution after another, and every version of MacOS seems to introduce its own issues.

[ioquatix]

It should be super easy to do this - i.e. it should just work. The fact that it isn't is a bug.

Are you using MacPorts or Homebrew?

[mockdeep]

We were using homebrew. As far as I can tell, it doesn't have any support for specific versions of applications, so much as for a limited set of versions. In this case the only other version of ImageMagick seems to be too old.

[ioquatix]

I would recommend using MacPorts, I've found it to be much more stable and tested in general than Homebrew. If it works with MacPorts, we can recommend that to start with and then contact the Homebrew team to let them know something is wrong with their version of ImageMagick.

[mockdeep]

Oh, I was under the impression that Homebrew was the standard for installing packages on Macs these days. Unfortunately, I'm not in touch with the fellow I was helping out. But some readme instructions might be helpful for the future. Does MacPorts have support for older versions?

[ioquatix]

Homebrew is great in certain situations, because users can submit updates, whereas the MacPorts process is a lot slower to accept changes, but usually this means that things are tested a bit better and a bit more stable (IMHO).

However, I think your right, Homebrew is getting a lot of traction, but I think simply by design it will never be as stable as MacPorts. I've personally used both, and previously to that, fink. I'm very happy with MacPorts and I haven't had any major issues with it.

N.B. stable isn't always a good design criteria - it depends on the requirements.

[bf4]

@ioquatix I don't know anyone that uses macports less recommends it.

In any case, @mockdeep if you can contribute what you've learned in a PR, that would be great. (If you already have, my apologies, I haven't reviewed all the issues in a bit).

[mockdeep]

@bf4 Unfortunately, all we really learned is that none of the existing solutions seem to work.

[fjfish]

Hi guys

AFAIK (or can tell) XCode now complains when you pass it command line args it doesn't understand. So the fail I've got to is:

/usr/bin/clang -o conftest -I/Users/francisfish/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p247/include/ruby-2.0.0/x86_64-darwin11.4.2 -I/Users/francisfish/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p247/include/ruby-2.0.0/ruby/backward -I/Users/francisfish/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p247/include/ruby-2.0.0 -I.  -I/usr/local/include/ImageMagick  -I/usr/local/include/ImageMagick  conftest.c  -L. -L/Users/francisfish/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p247/lib -L/usr/local/opt/libyaml/lib -L/usr/local/opt/readline/lib -L/usr/local/opt/libksba/lib -L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib  -L/usr/local/lib -L/usr/local/lib -L/usr/X11/lib -R/usr/X11/lib    -L/usr/local/lib -lMagickCore -llcms -ltiff -lfreetype -ljpeg -lXext -lSM -lICE -lX11 -lXt -lbz2 -lz -lm -lpthread -lltdl  -lruby.2.0.0  -lpthread -ldl -lobjc "
clang: error: unknown argument: '-R/usr/X11/lib' [-Wunused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future]
clang: note: this will be a hard error (cannot be downgraded to a warning) in the future
checked program was:
/* begin */
1: #include "ruby.h"
2:
3: int main(int argc, char **argv)
4: {
5:   return 0;
6: }
/* end */

The temporary fix is to tell clang that you don't mind by setting ARCHFLAGS thusly:

ARCHFLAGS=-Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future

However, when you prepend this to the gem install as recommended on Stack Overflow it's ignored, looks like clang is ingoring the env variable. I've proved that prepending it to the clang command does work.

There are two ways forward

1. Work out how to pass the ARCHFLAGS var into the build (but as it says this is temporary until Apple decide to get mean)
2. Stop passing -R/usr/X11/lib when building on Darwin and any other flags I may not yet have been bitten by.

I looked at doing the second one but the indirection employed in creating the list of libraries is too well hidden for me to get my head around.

Hope this helps.