Can't compile Virtual Box on Mac OS X El Capitan

[Enclle]

Hello there,

I made the Virtual Box source code checkout (svn ....), then I followed the instructions to build Virtual Box on Mac OS X (as from here: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Mac%20OS%20X%20build%20instructions ), but the configure has instructions for older versions only, so it can't "detect" the new version, so I modified the configure and "hardcoded" the "detection" of 10.15, the path to Xcode and the MacOSX10.11.sdk path, and added the path to the openssl lib with --with-openssl-dir=..., then the configure script executed ok, but when I executed kmk command, there was no kmk executable, so I made a checkout of the source code as instructed here ​http://trac.netlabs.org/kbuild/wiki/Download, but I had trouble compiling it, so I downloaded the source code of Virtual Box (VirtualBox-5.0.2.tar.bz2), extracted, modified the configure file, executed it, then issued kmk, and it failed saying that I had not a compatible Xcode, then I edited the Config.kmk, "hardcoded" the Xcode version (7.2), executed it again, then it started building, but failed because it was not able to figure out the compilers (wanted the gcc ones version 4.2).

Please, someone there update a Mac machine to OS X El Capitan and Xcode to 7.2 version and update the kbuild files to deal with Xcode 7.2. Also, Xcode now has multiples platforms sdks, so the path to the Mac OS X Sdk is now a bit longer.

[Klaus Espenlaub]

We're not joking on the build instructions page. You can't use Xcode versions newer than 4.1.x to build VirtualBox. This might change eventually, but it's not expected for the foreseeable future.

There are instructions how to extract Xcode 4.1.x on newer OSX releases (the installer refuses to run), so I don't think this is a showstopper.

What we'll fix is the version detection in the configure script. Handling El Capitan was missing (and even the already existing Yosemite one had a bug).

[Socratis]

Replying to klaus:

We're not joking on the build instructions page. You can't use Xcode versions newer than 4.1.x to build VirtualBox. This might change eventually, but it's not expected for the foreseeable future.

I know this is an old ticket, but it was brought to my attention by the macports people. I have a set of instructions that can successfully build VirtualBox on any OSX 10.9 to 10.13 included, up until revision 74294 (2018-09-16) from the trunk. After that it breaks due to OpenSSL issues, which I'm currently working on resolving (hence the warning from the macports people).

The instructions are in the forums, ​"Build VirtualBox ≥ 5.1.2 on OSX ≥ 10.9" and the related discussion is in ​"(Discussion) Build VirtualBox ≥ 5.1.2 on OSX ≥ 10.9".