OSS Hell, Tiger Edition

Every time there’s a major OS X update the ongoing publishing software, which depends on Perl, MySQL, and ImageMagick all playing nice with each other, and on Emacs, predictably falls apart. Each time, the fix-up recipe is a little different and I do a post here in hopes of aiding others in a similar situation.

Emacs · Unfortunately, my compiled-from-source Emacs quit working. Fortunately, Apple now points to a pre-built version. Unfortunately, it exits silently without doing anything. Fortunately, Mindlube pointed me to the version on DarwinPorts. It works and comes with a nice native-Mac installer.

ImageMagick · It just worked. (Sigh of relief).

Backward Steps · The ongoing publisher complained that it couldn’t talk to mysql through DBD. So I went to CPAN and tried to install DBD::mysql but it wasn’t happy because it couldn’t find something called mysql_config. So I tried to use Fink (via apt-get) to update everything, but that didn’t work because it didn’t like the gcc version. Fortunately, Paul Hoffman sent me good advice, via Macintouch, that you have to remove XCode 1.X and install XCode 2.0.

Terrific, except for a half-hour of poking around developer.apple.com turned up lots of pages about how wonderful XCode 2.0 was, but no place to download it. I was starting to snarl at family members when I discovered that it’s there on the Tiger DVD.

The Home Stretch · After that, the only problem was that the latest Fink mysql wouldn’t interoperate with the latest CPAN DBD::mysql, so I had to switch over to all-Fink for everything Perl-related, and it was all straightforward from there on in (don’t forget essential steps like sudo gcc_select 4.0, sudo apt-get update, and sudo fink selfupdate).