libcompat doesn't build on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (Build9a559)

[thomas.kosch@…]

libcompat doesn't on Leopard because the definition of "L_cuserid" is removed from stdio.h.

[ryandesign@…]

Does one actually need libcompat on Leopard?

[thomas.kosch@…]

Yes. It‘s needed by fortune for example

[ryandesign@…]

fortune no longer depends on libcompat as of r30319. Any other remaining reason why libcompat would be needed on Leopard?

[ryandesign@…]

Has duplicate #13717.

[dlr@…]

Replying to ryandesign@macports.org:

fortune no longer depends on libcompat as of r30319. Any other remaining reason why libcompat would be needed on Leopard? The xmgr5-3.01M code (x-y plotting with INEL/NRC extensions) uses libcompat. I was able to copy the tiger libcompat libraries to leopard and they worked but that is not really a viable path forward.

Doug Reeder

[toby@…]

Looks like Xmgr is obsolete as well (replaced by grace), so wouldn't it be safe to delete libcompat now?

[ryandesign@…]

It does not appear that the xmgr port (which was added in r38235, months after Doug mentioned it above) depends on libcompat. But I filed #16908 to delete xmgr.

The only port I can find that now depends on libcompat is still needed by larn, which depends on it on all OSes except Darwin 9. Adam, does larn still requires libcompat on earlier Mac OS X and on non-Mac OSes?

[aschenke@…]

Replying to ryandesign@…:

The only port I can find that now depends on libcompat is still needed by larn, which depends on it on all OSes except Darwin 9. Adam, does larn still requires libcompat on earlier Mac OS X and on non-Mac OSes?

Looking at the source code, larn needs libcompat for the ftime function. This function is provided with 10.5, so libcompat is not needed on Leopard. I don't have a pre-Leopard system to test with unfortunately, but from what I can tell it looks like ftime is also available in Tiger (10.4) but not in earlier versions; older man pages for ftime on OS X I found on Google explicitly call for usage of libcompat. If this is the case, and not an error with the man page, larn would still need libcompat for OS X versions older than 10.4.

If we need to remove libcompat, it should be fairly simple to write a patch for larn to use the newer gettimeofday function, which is basically what libcompat does. It would be helpful if someone with access to older systems could try building larn without libcompat; any problems would occur during compilation or linking rather than at run-time.