[vbox-dev] Sketch of how to build on OSX 10.9?

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Jon,

On 17.06.2014 05:18, Jon Seymour wrote:
> It seems the source tree has support for OSX 10.7 (Lion) but not
> later versions of OSX.

Depends how you mean this... the resulting build definitely works on
Mavericks.

> Could someone provide a sketch of what would be required to make my
> OSX 10.9 system capable of building VirtualBox for OSX from source?

The sketch is in the build prereqs page for OSX. You *need* to use the
mentioned Xcode version, otherwise you end up with either build errors
or a crippled build. Not all parts of VirtualBox can be built with
llvm/clang (even though I heard that the very newest versions have
implemented the missing functionality, no idea if Apple picked them up
already), they need proper gcc.

> Would I be better off editing the source to allow it to build against
> the 10.9 SDKs or, alternatively, trying to find copies of the earlier
> SDKs and building against those?

To my knowledge you need an older SDK, too. Don't know if they're as
annoying as Xcode (its installer simply refuses to run on newer OSX
versions, leaving only the tedious manual extraction of the contained
files which needs using "xar" at least twice - the result runs just fine
on Mavericks).

> Has anyone managed to build it on a system that only has homebrew as
>  distinct from MacPorts? I understand TeX is problematic with
> homebrew systems. Can MacTex be substituted as required?

Building the docs is something we don't usually do on Macs (even though
it should be possible), there's no point in building them many times.
One box builds them and the others fetch it...

Klaus
>
> jon.