nvi port on Ventura

[Kastus Shchuka]

I got an MBP modern enough to run Ventura. (My workhorse MBA cannot go above High Sierra).

For my personal needs I prefer nvi over vim that comes with macOS. This is my daily driver on MBA.

I can build nvi on High Sierra just fine, also binary package for High Sierra is available from buildbots.

When I tried to install nvi on Ventura, first I noticed absence of binary package. Next, my attempt to build port failed miserably.

I also found ticket #64197 on trac.

My first instinct was to try clang of the same version as on High Sierra (clang-9.0), but that did not make any change. Build was still failing.

Then I checked nvi on homebrew and found out that it builds there on all macOS versions and they have binaries available.

Homebrew formula adds this flag to configure:

# Xcode 12 needs the "-Wno-implicit-function-declaration" to compile successfully
      # The usual trick of setting $CFLAGS in the environment doesn't work for this
      # configure file though, but specifying an explicit CC setting does
      system "./configure", "--prefix=#{prefix}",
                            "--program-prefix=n",
                            "--disable-dependency-tracking",
                            "CC=" + ENV.cc + " -Wno-implicit-function-declaration"

This got me over the error "implicit declaration of function 'conv_enc'", but the build was still breaking on the linking step.

What I found next was that configure script populates libtool with correct setting of allow_undefined_flag on High Sierra, but not on Ventura. Apparently, the logic in configure works for MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET 10.* but not on any higher versions of macOS.

I guess homebrew works around it by running autoreconfigure, but I was unsuccessful in that as it complained about missing configure.ac file.

So my crude fix was a patch for configure script (with appropriate adjustments to the portfile). 

With this patch I was able to build nvi, and it is quite usable (in my limited testing)

I commented on my findings in https://trac.macports.org/ticket/64197.

Thanks,

Kastus