Assuming I were to compile some of the sources to produce updated modules for macOS (see for example the thread on recent align module failures), where, on a Mac do I put the executables?

I have searched my Mac but not found it.

And, another thing: if I compile as a Universal binary (with Apple Silicon and x86 code) would that cause a problem?

Thanks,
Richard

Hi Richard,

I guess the simple answer is that the executables go wherever your build process puts them. If you followed the craft instructions on the kstars git repository its likely you'll have a directory called AstroRoot in your home directory. The build processes will put the executables in there. The build process will also copy the indi executables into the Kstars executable package.

I haven't tried creating a Universal binary although I can't see why it would be a problem. If you make changes and push them back via the Merge Request process, then new code gets built by the standard linux process, so if there are issues the pipeline just won't build. Your changes would then by part of the next release on linux, Mac, etc. but you could build and run your own version as a universal binary.

Thanks John.

I'm familiar with using the Xcode IDE to write source and build executables, for example for a couple of X2 drivers for TheSkyX. And also the Xojo IDE which I've used for many applications due to the speed of development.

But I'm not used to Qt (except for the creation of GUI elements for X2 plugins) and nor to craft.

I saw that the KStars repository says that QtCreator is recommended but before building anything various packages are required "from your distribution" -- but being macOS, this is not obvious. Is there a tutorial on how to set up a development environment on macOS? That would be very helpful.

Cheers,
Richard

Robert Lancaster did a lot of the work to get Kstars built on Mac. This site contains a lot of information,..
github.com/rlancaste/kstars-on-osx-craft/blob/master/README.md/

Rob is the expert on this stuff as far as Mac is concerned, but I might be able to help if you run into issues.

That looks promising! I'll get onto it!

Cheers,
Richard

First lesson: it seems you have to switch from the default zsh shell in the Terminal to bash (unless there's more i don't know)


Turns out this is not the case.

Cheers,
Richard

I'm a bit flummoxed now. Followed the instructions and reached the part about testing by building a standard tool kcalc. After about 5 minutes of text whizzing up the terminal screen I get an error: No executable found. [it turns out this was building the various libraries, so one-off]

I looked through the logs but to my untrained eye sifting through the multiple lines of "xxx ignored ..." etc, isn't very illuminating. [There were only a couple of these, and tracking them, in the cold light of day, they were file paths not quite correct to some rather important directories in Xcode's SDK. It looks like this may be related]

I did try again, deleting the CraftRoot folder and staring again, but with no change in the end result.

Anyway it's late (00:13 after a 4am workothon yesterday evening). I may try again tomorrow but I'm mindful of Einstein's comments on repeating failing procedures.

Cheers,
Richard

Following up your offer of help on specific issues:
I managed to resolve the problem of the CraftSettings.ini file overwriting my selection of CPU (resulting in failed builds) but I have not resolved the problem that it also overwrites the version of Qt that I selected (6)/ The result of that is that it wants to use deprecated libraries and also fails to build anything.

I suppose you have a way around that?

Thanks,
Richard

Yeah, Craft wants to use its own Qt. I can't really remember but I think I went with whatever version Craft was using as you get errors if you try and do anything else. There's probably a way around it but I know very little about craft unfortunately.

So I'm using Qt Creator 5.0.1 (based on Qt 5.15.2) from Sep 14 2021.

Not ideal but it works.

That's the thing. When installing craft chose the options arm64 and Qt6, so it installed appropriate packages.

But then the tailored CraftSettings.ini file overwrote the arm64 selection with x86 and Qt6 by Qt5. So the first problem I got was "bad CPU" or something like that.

I was able to fix that easily in CraftSettings.ini but the Qt thing is more complex. I can find the section in CraftSettings.ini where this is covered, but it's marked: for experts only, which I'm not. This seems to be a bit that Rob added as it's not in the original file in the craft distribution.

So I'm a bit stuck at this point. The build-stars.sh script now goes fine until it has to download various packages to build INDI, but by now the cache repository is pointing at Qt5 instead of Qt6 and some are not found or are deprecated, so it gives up.

Fortunately for me, I didn't run into this.

You could try installing the packages manually. Which ones are actually failing?