Building WSJTX (Update)

Well we have got a little further in our quest to build an older development machine based on OSX, overall we like OSX but the dependency hell with PHP versions being installed using brew is now causing major issues.  The GD library has a few bugs in the latest release that breaks PHP install when using with brew, We are going to try and use OSX 10.14 Mojave and see if this fairs a little better.

The performance of the machine on OSX 10.13 is not too bad the major issue being the lack of support for this operating system with Homebrew, Mac Ports are little or no help in this situation.

So we have a working solution for using PHP / local development environment for development of this site with OSX 10.13, it to is a bit convoluted we use Local which is an excellent local development server, with MamPro delivering the PHP 7.4 command line support, not an ideal mix but it works, we have also decided to install 10.14 to a separate partition for initial testing so that we can see how OSX Mojave 10.14 fairs with PHP / GCC installation.

The decision to move to OSX 10.14 Mojave was a good one, all of the PHP components are now working and operational we now have a working development machine, we did install to a second smaller partition so now the only job to to backup and restore the new OSX 10.14 partition to the real partition so we have more disk space available for development.

We did have an issue with the latest Google chrome but we moved to an earlier version and now our desired browser is working correctly.

After we moved to the larger partition it became apparent that all was not well with this version of OSX (10.14) so we need to think of a better alternative, seems like a lot of libraries are broken for this platform  so we now need a better plan.

We are working on solving this issue time to dig through the log files and find the culprit(s).

So I bit the dust and obtained a nice 2014 i5 Mac Mini running Big Sur, is is a very fast machine and now dedicated to WSJTX operating and development, we have decided against a new M1 Mac Mini at this stage hopefully this machine will prove much more useable for WSJTX / OSX & PHP development.

Good news we are now able to build parts of WSJTX on OSX Big Sur, time now to start working on adding the Xeigu G90 to.

We did not use Mac Ports to install the libraries, we opted for Homebrew and will provide instructions on how this was achieved if it works.

After my initial success with building WSJTX there were quite a few underlying issues with libraries on OSX Big Sur the main issue is around the Fortran Compiler gfortran that seems to have become broken with the latest updates.

Now we have a working development system, we did have to step back to OSX Mojave that is the current OSX version used for production builds of WSJTX, we did not use Homebew but followed the instructions in the read me file and it now builds and runs perfectly. 

We do have some additional instructions that we will post here of course. The next phases will be to update to Catalina now we have the correct build tools installed, retest and then Big Sur.

How we will do this is clone the current system drive to an external SSD then boot from this and use Apples updater to get the base OS to the highest level, the build chains should remain intact after the upgrade.