I've got a spare PPC G4 Mac here with OS X 10.4 and possibly 10.5 that for a couple of years has been earmarked for an FPC and possibly Lazarus test system. I believe that I've got Xcode 2.0 on the 10.4 system, if I try running ld gcc or make from a shell I get an appropriate response. I've not fiddled with 10.5 since I believe it's incomplete and there isn't much RAM in the machine.

The FPC download from Sourceforge etc. unpacks to include ReadMe.txt, which refers me to http://www.freepascal.org/xcode.html which turns out to be a redirect to http://www.freepascal.org/down/powerpc/macosx.html hence the generic http://sourceforge.net/projects/freepascal/files/

I really don't want to mess this system up since I don't have any OS X experience, don't have installation media, and the chap who gave it me has fled the country (specifically, he was last heard of discovering that his bicycle was incompatible with Brno's tram tracks). Can anybody tell me definitively what else I need, and what I should be doing next?

In our previous episode, Mark Morgan Lloyd said:

which refers me to http://www.freepascal.org/xcode.html which turns out to be a redirect to http://www.freepascal.org/down/powerpc/macosx.html

That's wrong and lands you on an old copy of the site. The central site's pages end on .var (apache translation system)

http://www.freepascal.org/down/powerpc/macosx.var

The dutch mirror doesn't run apache and there the html page is still valid and the same as the above .var:

http://freepascal.stack.nl/down/powerpc/macosx.html

Afaik that's it, binutils+make+gdb from xcode + the installer.

Not /my/ wrong though :-)

Thanks, I'll see where I get to.

Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

> Afaik that's it, binutils+make+gdb from xcode + the installer. Thanks, I'll see where I get to.

Testing 2.7.1 at revision 29398, compiling with

make NOGDB=1 OPT='-V2.6.4 -O- -gl -Xs-' all

which has worked for the other architectures I've tried it on, I get

/bin/mkdir -p powerpc/units/powerpc-darwin
/usr/local/bin/ppcppc -Ur -Xs -O2 -n -Fupowerpc -Fusystems -Fu/usr/local/src/fpc/trunk-2.7.1-29398/rtl/units/powerpc-darwin -Fipowerpc -FE. -FUpowerpc/units/powerpc-darwin -dRELEASE -V2.6.4 -O- -gl -Xs- -dpowerpc -dGDB -dBROWSERLOG -Fuppcgen -Sew pp.pas /usr/bin/ld: unknown flag: -macosx_version_min
An error occurred while linking
pp.pas(244,13) Error: Error while linking
pp.pas(244,13) Fatal: There were 1 errors compiling module, stopping Fatal: Compilation aborted

I presume that ld from Xcode 2.0 is slightly too old, and that that flag isn't supported. Is there a way of accommodating this at the command line, or is the only way by finding the flag in the build files and disabling it?

[Slightly later] It looks as though it's in the compiler itself, so I'd presumably have to start off with a cross-build or work back to 2.6.0... which is a lot of work for an architecture that I don't really use.

Hi Mark,

you should use -s option
for compilation.
This will generate a ppas.sh script
that contains the call to the linker.

Maybe removing this command line option will be enough to fix linking.

I hope you will be able to generate a recent
Free Pascal Complier on your machine!

Pierre Muller

Install Xcode 2.5, its linker should support that option. For instructions on how to get it: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1204824/where-can-i-download-xcode-for-mac-os-x-10-4

Jonas

Thanks for that Jonas, I'll use it as a fallback position but am already making slow progress using -st etc.

-Fu/usr/local/src/fpc/trunk-2.7.1-29398/rtl/units/powerpc-darwin -Fipowerpc -FE. -FUpowerpc/units/powerpc-darwin -dRELEASE -V2.6.4 -O- -gl -Xs- -dpowerpc -dGDB -dBROWSERLOG -Fuppcgen -Sew pp.pas

isn't supported. Is there a way of accommodating this at the command line, or is the only way by finding the flag in the build files and disabling it?

Install Xcode 2.5, its linker should support that option. For

instructions on how to get it:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1204824/where-can-i-download-xcode-for-mac-os-x-10-4

Yes, it does as I can successfully build FPC trunk on my Mac OS X 10.4 PPC.

Regards,
Sven

All FPC Darwin/PPC versions from the past years have only been tested with the Xcode 2.5 tools and hence are also only supported with that version. You may encounter other issues by sticking with an outdated version. No changes will be made to FPC to accomodate for them either, because an upgrade path to a newer version with fixed bugs and required features is readily available (so there is no reason to complicate the compiler to support the older versions as well).

Jonas

Already worked some of that out, by reference to the notes I did on building MIPS etc. natively.

I've built a fixed 2.6.4 32-bit compiler to make sure that the initial installation is runnable, and a full build of 2.7.1 appears to have got over the initial "hump". This is going to take a while since the machine doesn't have much RAM, I want to do as much testing as possible before I open it up in case anything goes wrong.

Assuming this works, I hope to try Lazarus. I don't know whether I've got the time to progress to Leopard/10.5 and the 64-bit compiler, but I'd imagine that that's somewhat nearer what other people are testing regularly. Considering other platforms, that leaves 68K on Debian that I was hoping to test but probably won't have time to, and an AMD Athlon which Lazarus doesn't seem to like... again, I assume that somebody's picked any problems up already on such a popular platform.

If FPC's -k option can add linker options, wouldn't an option to remove them be useful?

I'll probably be back with more problems...

Understood, wasn't asking you to. If I can limp along with pre-2.5 on OSX 10.4, I might try putting a newer one on 10.5.