MacPorts 2.0.4 and recommendation for Lion Xcode version

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 19, 2012, at 03:01, Tabitha McNerney wrote:

> sometimes get "conftest" crashes that get logged in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports, which I'm fairly certain happens during a process associated with MacPorts (though I could be wrong). For example here's part of one:

[snip]

> Has anyone seen these types of crashes show up in their system? 

Yes, certainly. Configure scripts typically run hundreds of small programs, each of which is generally called "conftest", to determine the capabilities of various aspects of your system. Some programs include configure tests that are designed to crash in some situations; whether or not the test program crashes lets the build system know how it needs to proceed. For example, they might write a test that uses a particular function; if the test crashes, that means that function is not available on your system and they should not use it. If you can identify which program's configure script is running these crashing tests, you should report the problem to the developers of that software, and explain to them that on OS X, depending on how the user has set up their system, a crash reporter dialog box might appear, which is intrusive to the user and would be best avoided. Hopefully this will encourage the developers to write a better configure test that does not involve deliberately crashing a program. When I reported such a problem to the developer of gettext last year, he quickly developed a fix:

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/29412

Admittedly however there has not been a new release of gettext since then, so MacPorts has not yet benefited from that fix. But hopefully some day that will happen.