Alternatives to GNU Make for users of newer OS X

Ultrix · July 11, 2015, 3:21pm

As you may already know, Apple has integrated all the GNU developer tools into their own graphical development environment so you can no longer use them from the command line. This means that open source software that is distributed as source is inaccessible to users of newer versions of Mac OS X, because we can't use gcc or make to compile it. Is there an alternative method of doing this?

Don_Cragun · July 11, 2015, 3:39pm

That is news to me. I just tried the following on Mac OS X Yosemite Version 10.10.4:

$ cat hello.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
	printf("Hello world.\n");
	return(0);
}
$ make hello
cc     hello.c   -o hello
$ ./hello
Hello world.
$

You do have to perform a free download of the Xcode development tools to get them, but once you do that gcc , make , and the other common development tools are readily available even if you don't use the Xcode tools to manage your source code.

Ultrix · July 21, 2015, 7:31pm

don cragun:

That is news to me. I just tried the following on Mac OS X Yosemite Version 10.10.4:
$ cat hello.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
   printf("Hello world.\n");
   return(0);
}
$ make hello
cc     hello.c   -o hello
$ ./hello
Hello world.
$ 
You do have to perform a free download of the Xcode development tools to get them, but once you do that gcc , make , and the other common development tools are readily available even if you don't use the Xcode tools to manage your source code.

I'm not sure I know what you're talking about. I already have gcc, make, etc. installed on my machine, and have added their directory to $PATH in my startup script. However, when I run gcc, it tells me certain libraries are missing. I can't link C libraries except through XCode. Will downloading the developer tools change this?

Don_Cragun · July 21, 2015, 7:45pm

You originally said:

Now you're saying gcc and make work just fine, but don't magically download open source libraries needed by the open source software you downloaded from a 3rd party site. When you're downloading open source software, you also have to download, build, and install the open source libraries upon which it depends.

Ultrix · July 22, 2015, 4:07pm

Okay. I copied all the C header files into /usr/include a while back while I was trying to get it to work. Should I delete them before I download the developer tools?