[PD-dev] Compiling pd on OS X

[Ryan Schmidt]

Hello, I’m a manager of the MacPorts package management system, trying to add pd to our collection of software.

I’ve tried to do this several times over the past few years, never leading to success. Now I’m finally asking for help.


First, it’s unclear where to get pd. I had previously recorded the project’s homepage as:

http://pd.iem.at/

The download link there takes me to an FTP server:

ftp://ftp.iem.at/pub/pd/

There, the latest available is pd-0.43-0.src.tar.gz. Following the building instructions for running autogen.sh, configure, make and make install (and first applying patches to several files to remove the undesired references to /sw), it succeeds, however trying to run the pd executable results in an error message that “5400” was not found. Not intuitive. There’s also a pre-compiled OS X application available for download, but it’s unclear how I might build that myself.


Next, I found a different homepage for the project:

http://puredata.info/

This refers me to SourceForge to download:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/pure-data/files/pure-data/

where the latest version is pd-0.45-4.src.tar.gz. This version does not build. First, configure complains about missing SDKs:

configure: error: Couldn't find 10.5, 10.6, or 10.7 SDK
configure: error: ./configure failed for portaudio

I am using Xcode 5, which only includes the 10.8 and 10.9 SDKs.

This error occurs even if I use the configure argument --disable-portaudio. I already have portaudio 19.20140130 installed; if it’s required, I’d rather use that than have pd build a different version, but I don’t know how to inform pd of that.

Overcoming this error by using the configure argument --disable-mac-universal, make fails with:

src/hostapi/coreaudio/pa_mac_core.c:140:12: error: 'AudioDeviceGetPropertyInfo' is deprecated: first deprecated in OS X 10.6 [-Werror,-Wdeprecated-declarations]
   error = AudioDeviceGetPropertyInfo( hostApiDevice,
           ^

Overcoming this by removing -Werror from portaudio/configure.in, make fails with:

Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:
  "_find_default_device", referenced from:
      _pm_init in libportmidi.a(pmmac.o)
     (maybe you meant: _pm_find_default_device)
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture x86_64

I see this was previously reported to this mailing list in August of last year, with no resolution:

http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-dev/2013-08/019598.html


So with all these problems I’m now once again at the point of being frustrated with this software and giving up. Can anybody explain to me how to build a usable pd on OS X? How was the available OS X app built? I just want to get pd finally included in MacPorts so I can get on with what I’m really trying to do, which is to add another software package that requires pd.

Thanks.