[Gretl-devel] gretl on mac os10.5

[Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti]

On Mon, 26 Nov 2007, Sven Schreiber wrote:

> Hi,
>
> here are my experiences with gretl (1.6.5) on Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), on an 
> Intel Mac:
>
> The dmg (http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/pub/gretl/gretl-1.6.5.dmg) mostly works: 
> I can run gretl with the ./gretl command described on 
> http://gretl.sourceforge.net/osx.html; however, double-clicking gives an 
> error saying that X11 couldn't be started or something like that.
>
> Then I tried to build from source, so I installed the most recent fink 
> version (0.27.9?) and followed the steps on 
> http://gretl.sourceforge.net/osx.html. It didn't work, here's what went 
> wrong:
>
> 1) installing "dlcompat" gave me a (fink) error "no package found for 
> specification" (BTW, I think I configured fink to use the "unstable" packages 
> to get more recent versions. Could that be a problem?)
>
> 2) I proceeded anyway and then gretl's configure script complained about 
> missing fftw3, so I installed that under fink as well.
>
> 3) Then configure went ok, but on make I got an error with ms_ole_open_vfs. 
> That sounds very windows-ish to me, so I guess some platform check failed.
>
> Any ideas? Has anything changed since 1.6.5 that could help?

I believe that at some point gretl was part of the fink offering; this was 
very early on, like version 1.5.0 or so. I don't know what the present 
state if Fink is, but IMO the only long-term solution for OSX support is 
to have one or more of the Fink guys maintain a gretl package, like Dirk 
Eddelbuettel does for Debian.

Alternatively, someone suggested me to check out MacPorts 
(http://www.macports.org/). Apparently, this is an OSX translation of the 
"port" mechanism they use in BSD-land. One may conjecture that with 
MacPorts installed, it could be possible to adapt the FreeBSD gretl 
port (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/math/gretl/). But I'm 
talking about something I really have no clue on, so be careful :-)


Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Economia
Università Politecnica delle Marche

r.lucchetti at univpm.it
http://www.econ.univpm.it/lucchetti