[CWB] MacOSX 3.2 binaries

[Stefan Evert]

Hi everyone!

Sorry about re-opening this thread so late ...

> You'll only have glib.h if you've (separately) installed the glib2
> development files on that machine -- I'm not sure if there's an "easy"
> way to do this on Mac (Stefan would know as he is the Mac expert!) ...

No there isn't -- that's precisely the reason why I've been so concerned about being able to produce binary release of CWB 3.2+ on Mac OS X.  GLib isn't a standalone library either -- it relies on a number of other packages such as gettext and pkgconfig, which also need to be installed.

Unfortunately, there is no binary distribution of GLib (which is what Mac users are used to installing), so the least painful way of getting a build environment for the CWB is to install through MacPorts (which is what I did).  MacPorts will do you the favour -- amongst others -- of installing a complete Perl5 distribution in addition to system Perl in the process.

My /opt/local/ tree currently eats up 2.5 GiB of hard disk space just because I needed a few libraries and software packages that aren't already part of the system and aren't easily available as binary distributions.  Can you tell that I hate this MacPorts stuff? ;-)

Anyway, the upshot is that anyone wanting to use CWB 3.2+ on a Mac has to go through the same tedious process, which in my experience takes several hours and wastes a half GiB of disk space or so.

It would be great if we could find a way to distribute the CWB for Mac as a binary package bundled with all required libraries (that's what most other Mac software does).  Any volunteers to look into this?

Cheers,
Stefan

PS: Have you seen my cool new signature? :)