[News]

News: wxFormBuilder v3.0 released!

[rjmyst3]

Guilherme Flach has been kind enough to help us fix our code so that it compiles on Mac OS X.
He compiled a binary and posted it for us to distribute.

I think it is nearly the same revision as the official 3.0 RC2. You can download it here:
wxFormBuilder.app.zip
It is for PPC, and depends on wxWidgets 2.8.0 unicode dynamic libraries.

These are his installation instructions:

Just download it, uncompress then drag wxFormBuilder.app to the Application folder. The installation is complete! (The .fpb files get the correct icon and link to wxFB, double-clicking on .fbp opens the wxFB ...)

He also included instructions for building wxFB on Mac OS X with XCode, which I've published verbatim on our wiki, here:
http://wiki.wxformbuilder.org/Main/BuildingFromSourceOnMacOSX

We are very excited about this, we would love to begin officially supporting Mac. We just need volunteers to help with testing/building on Mac. If anyone is interested, please contact us.

[Auria]

Hi,

I just tried the package. I think requirements should be stated clearly because otherwise it won't run.

1) it is a PPC package. You should really specify it clearly with the download as OS X runs on 2 different arhcitectures and people will want to know wich one is used
2) it depends on wxWidgets 2.8.0 unicode dynamic libraries (dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/lib/libwx_macu-2.8.0.dylib, reason: image not found) . On my computer, the app refused to run because i had 2.8.5. This can be fixed by either specifying clearly what is required or by including wx inside the bundle. (But i think including them inside the bundle makes more sense since you shouldn't require a specific version, especially if it's an older one. That's what is usually done on OS X)

Apart from that, very interesting, i'll try building it from source myself when i have time

[rjmyst3]

I've added the requirements to the announcements, thanks for the info.

If you build a more portable package, please post it, and we'll distribute it.

Thanks.

[Auria]

I've added the requirements to the announcements, thanks for the info.

If you build a more portable package, please post it, and we'll distribute it.

Thanks.

Is the author of the current package still interested in maintaining it? If so, i will rather let him, but if he's not interested anymore i could look into it.

[rjmyst3]

Is the author of the current package still interested in maintaining it? If so, i will rather let him, but if he's not interested anymore i could look into it.

He never replied when I asked him to maintain it. So I assume he is not interested.

I will ask again, and try to get a definite answer.

[Auria]

I took a look at it, and honestly his instructions are a bit vague on some points. It is needed to recreate all the build system and figure out all dependencies wich is rather long.

Alternatively, i tried just using the build system that's already setup for other platforms, but i get the following error message:

plugins/additional/premake.lua:219: `popen' not supported
done...

any idea for any for the second issue? i can continue playing a bit with the XCode project but i personnaly find it a pain to rebuild the whole deps system when there's already an existing build system.
thanks

[rjmyst3]

To be quite honest, we'd prefer that you use the existing premake build system. When all goes well, premake will generate GNU makefiles to build with.

See this post for a Mac quickstart:
http://forum.wxformbuilder.org/index.php?topic=298.msg1288#msg1288

The error you show indicates that the premake binary you are using does not have the 'popen' command, which we use with the wx-config program to determine your wxWidgets configuration.

Which premake binary did you use??

[Auria]

To be quite honest, i'd prefer using Premake too so i guess we agree 

I downloaded latest stable Premake from Sourceforge, version 3.4. I simply used the provided makefile. Maybe i didn't build it properly but i couldn't find any additional information either. (However, if premake doesn't support OS X properly, that will make matters significantly more difficult.)

I did not use the premake binary included in the /sdk subdirectory because it is for intel compters, and mine is a PPC ( remember, OS X runs on 2 different architectures atm )

I'll look at the script provided in the other post. It is meant to replace the one included in the source, wich is for linux, right?

EDIT: To clarify, on my first attempt, i used the linux script for generating makefiles but i modified /sdk/premake/premakelinux (or someting like that, don't remember exact name)  to make it point to a correct premake binary for mac PPC

[RJP Computing]

I am really glad that you agree to use Premake is the best way. As soon as we iron out these issues we can fully support a person building on Mac on a regular basis.

You are correct about how you tried Premake. It is Lua that is embedded into Premake that is the problem. I need to work with other functions that allow use to fire off executables. In the documentation for Lua, it does state that 'popen()' is not supported on all platforms. Now that being said, a volunteer build us, the version we ship in our sdk, for Mac, so I assume the 'popen()' works for Intel Macs.
There is a 'system()' type call that might be able to be used to pipe the data to a file then read the file in. I have to mess with this then have you test it.

How does that sound?

[Auria]

os x is exactly the same on PPC and intel apart architecture, therefore if someone got it worknig on intel, we can surely get it working on PPC, we'd just need to find that person and ask him what he did (and blame him for only providing binaries )

if it can be made to work in another way it's fine too... i just have zero lua knowledge so i won't be very helpful here!

[rjmyst3]

It is also possible (and I think likely) that we didn't use popen at the time the premake-mac worked.
Maybe we should look for an alternative to popen.

[Auria]

Well i'll be waiting for this alternative before trying anything else with wxFB, i've even tried building lua with popen support defined in the config header without success so i don't think there's anything more i can do meanwhile.

[RJP Computing]

This is disapointing. I am going to post to the Lua group about this before re-writing the Premake scripts. Details to follow.

[Auria]

Hi, i just discovered something... i tried the following script :
local wxconfig = io.popen("wx-config  --libs")
local wxlibs = wxconfig:read("*a")
wxconfig:close()
print(wxlibs)

and ran it with "lua file.lua"

it outputs
-L/usr/local/lib   -framework IOKit -framework Carbon -framework Cocoa -framework System -framework QuickTime  -lwx_macu_aui-2.8 -lwx_macu_xrc-2.8 -lwx_macu_qa-2.8 -lwx_macu_html-2.8 -lwx_macu_adv-2.8 -lwx_macu_core-2.8 -lwx_base_carbonu_xml-2.8 -lwx_base_carbonu_net-2.8 -lwx_base_carbonu-2.8

so my lua is built properly

the problem seems to be that premake includes its own lua, and uses this one instead of the one i built. i'll try again!

[Auria]

I just checked... premake includes its own version of Lua, which doesn't have the header file i need to activate popen support (luaconf.h) no idea if it's because it's old or because it's not a stand-alone version

It doesn't seem like premake has anything set-up for using another lua than their special built-in version... not sure how to activate popen in that modified version or if it's possible at all

I posted on the premake forums... we'll see what answer i get