My variant is crashing on launch on some macs

[half]

I originally posted about this a while ago, but now I want to follow up on Pete Mack's helpful advice:

I wrote:

Finally, I tried taking my work-in-progress to a friend's iMac and it would just crash on startup (before displaying a term), while it runs perfectly on my iMac and MacBook. Any ideas?

Pete Mack wrote:

Are you sure you've linked the right libraries? If it runs on a development machine, but not an ordinary machine, this is a likely bet. However, I have seen cases where an executable compiled for 10.3.7 didn't work on 10.3.9.

Pete may well be right about it being a linking issue as it works my two machines with developer tools installed and not on the friend's machine without them installed. Does anyone know how to do this linking?

[Pete Mack]

It's been a while since I worked on OSX, but here's what I recall:

Step 1. Do a local install, rather than running from the development environment.
(Have you verified that the dmg you are distributing actually works?)

Step 2. Run it from the command line to verify correct link. open term and cd to the angband parent directory:
.../angband$ ./Angband.app/Contents/MacOS/angband
See if there are any link errors in the standard error.

Step 3. Verify that your system calls are working. Use ktrace (kernel trace):
$ man ktrace
and run it with angband as an argument.

Step 4. Compare OS version numbers. Are you running on the same version? If not, are you relying on a feature from a later version?

[Nick]

I'm not sure what version of main-crb.c you're using, but I'd really recommend using the latest V version if you can.

[half]

Thanks Pete. I just tested on another machine without the dev tools and it worked perfectly. I don't have easy access at all to the previous machine where it crashed on startup, so this could take a while to work out. I'll try it on some other macs.

[half]

I'm not sure what version of main-crb.c you're using, but I'd really recommend using the latest V version if you can.

I had tried doing this, but the move to the new V folder system was too big an obstacle. Last time I tried, I spent several frustrating hours attempting to update but to no avail and ended up reverting to the old setup. I *think* I also tried just taking the good things from the new main-crb.c but also failed at that.

At the moment, just getting a release version is a bigger issue than changing the build system, but I definitely want to be able to incorporate improvements to the various main files in the future (and to a lesser degree to take code from V and variants and help V and variants take code from my variant).

[Nick]

I had tried doing this, but the move to the new V folder system was too big an obstacle. Last time I tried, I spent several frustrating hours attempting to update but to no avail and ended up reverting to the old setup. I *think* I also tried just taking the good things from the new main-crb.c but also failed at that.

Been there

At the moment, just getting a release version is a bigger issue than changing the build system

Yes, indeed. In fact, my previous advice was not very good - you're better getting something out the door, and when you've got the gameplay stable just moving to the whole V build system. That's a bit painful, but better than doing it piecemeal.