GSoC 2015 Idea Discussion

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Monday March 09 2015 12:30:40 Clemens Lang wrote:

> No, there are no stats, simply because we don't know. Personal experience says
> almost all of my ports built without Xcode when upgrading to Yosemite, where I
> did not install Xcode on purpose to test exactly that.

Interesting, given the trouble I encountered when I installed the latest CLT instead of the latest Xcode (because of reported issues with the IDE). Maybe those were because I did have an older Xcode version in place, but the error was not "your Xcode version is too old".

> Considering homebrew does not require Xcode, that's exactly what I would have
> expected as well.

Do you have Qt and/or KDE ports installed? If HB can install those without Xcode that can only mean that at least the basic SDKs are shipped either with the CLT or with the OS itself. That's not completely surprising given what an OS X framework is but that kinda begs the question why you'd need to install another copy with Xcode. (On 10.6, the 10.6 SDK contained mostly symlinks to /System/Library, /usr/lib etc, but that no longer appears to be the case on 10.9 ...)

> That's exactly where trace mode comes into play. It should be used during
> development to see if the port builds without Xcode present (by actually hiding
> the files shipped with Xcode).

That's one (the easiest?) approach. It might be more efficient to provide a summary of what files or frameworks (from Xcode) were used after a successful build, rather than letting a build break (after an unknown amount of successful building).
Knowing what system frameworks/APIs a port *actually* uses, in addition to the within-MacPorts dependencies, could have its uses.

R.