Given the recently rekindled interest in OS X and Linrad I decided to
see how things were working here in that regard.
I had gotten Linrad-03.28 working on both my iMac and MacPro back in Dec
2011. I didn't try it on the MacBook Air.
What I found today was that an OS X upgrade done since that time has
broken the installation, and I can't reconfigure/recompile due to
multiple missing symlinks. I suspect that this is due to the OS X
upgrade destroying all user-installed symlinks. I recall that
previously an OS X upgrade here destroyed all user-installed symlinks
and either MacPorts or Fink on one of my Macs...I don't recall which Mac
or which OS X upgrade that was, but I wouldn't be surprised if that has
happened again. At that time I had to start from ground zero and
re-create my entire unix environment [thank you Apple!!].
Apple is a pretty closed universe, and they "get away" with things like
this that would never be tolerated in the Microsoft world for 2
reasons: [1] the Mac world really is cult-like (I say this as the owner
of multiple Mac computers and Apple devices) and [2] only a small
fraction of Mac users stray from the prepackaged software offerings, so
when all user-installed symlinks disappear as the result of a software
upgrade, it is not a big deal in terms of number of affected users, even
though it is a major problem for the small number of affected users. So
Apple doesn't care.
I don't have time due to other projects to sort things out further here,
and don't plan to try to sort it out at this point as I have no need to
do so, but wanted to mention this in case anyone is trying to "get back
in the game" with Linrad on OS X as a result of the recent thread on
this subject. If you have upgraded your OS X since you last played with
Linrad, you may find that you have some major work to do. Here, I think
I would need to totally recreate my MacPorts installation to get things
working.
Just to be clear, none of this is a "Linrad" problem. The problem is
that OS X updates can absolutely trash user-installed symlinks as well
as other user-installed items that are essential for using unix on the
Mac. And when I say "user-installed", I don't mean only things that the
user did himself; I am also including symlinks that were installed by a
program such as MacPorts or Fink or other non-Apple program that Apple
didn't see fit to "protect" when it wrote the upgrade. Linrad just
happens to need a functioning unix-based system to configure, compile,
and run correctly, and so is caught in this web as an innocent bystander.
There was a brief thead on Linrad and OS X on this reflector back in
Dec. 2011. The URL for that should be something like:
http://groups.google.com/group/linrad/browse_thread/thread/55bf1a6e509f688d/2c09b3e49a795033?lnk=gst&q=os+x#2c09b3e49a795033
It didn't contain a lot of info that would be currently helpful, but it
does document that Linrad on OS X was in fact functioning at that time.
Have a great week all, and
73,
Roger Rehr
W3SZ