kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Marius Kintel <kintel@...>]

On 26. okt. 2007, at 20:47, Dick Hollenbeck wrote:

> What is the problem you are trying to solve, "it won't build on 
> the Mac"?
This is not an issue. KiCad builds under mac using the 
makefile.macosx as on the other platforms.
It's a bit of duplicated logic of course, but no showstoppers in 
terms of building.

> Then I would ask, please define "Mac", as this seems to be a moving
> target lately. Maybe we should agree on a terminology to describe the
> Mac platform that involves greater specificity.

I'll try to clarify something about the Mac platform:

o "Mac" these days refer to the Mac OS X platform. It is based on 
Darwin/FreeBSD with a set of proprietary stuff on top, and has been 
around since 2001. Older Mac OS versions are very different and has 
been obsolete for a long time.
o As such, Mac OS X is a quite well-defined platform, a lot more well- 
defined than "Linux" I would say.
o All versions of Mac OS X (e.g. 10.0, 10.1 .. 10.5) are in general 
compatible with each other.

As with any OS, the variations available are really only which 
platform abstraction or GUI toolkits are being used when writing 
applications. In case of KiCad, this is wxWidgets, which can be 
compiled natively for Windows, Mac OS X and a number of X11 toolkits 
under Linux (I don't know which versions KiCad supports). wxWidgets 
is trivial to install under Mac OS X as it's part of MacPorts, a 
collection of free software maintained for Mac OS X.

A reason for confusion about the definition of the Mac OS X platform 
might be that Mac OS X doesn't use X11 as a window system, but X11 is 
freely available as an optional install (similar to running an X11 
server under Windows using Cygwin/X).
Thus, some free software apps (e.g. Gimp, OpenOffice) tend to be 
ported to Mac OS X using X11, as this is easier although the 
application would suffer similarly to it would having to run an X11 
app under Windows.

I really recommend keeping KiCad tied to the native wxWidgets version 
btw.

~/= Marius

--
We are Elektropeople for a better living.