qt5-qtwebengine @5.15.12: Project ERROR: Could not resolve SDK Path for 'macosx10.15' using --show-sdk-path

[Gandoon (Erik Hedlund)]

Good afternoon,

This is mainly for information, as I have found a solution to the problem, and I am not aware if there is anything that can be done from MacPorts side to remedy this issue.

I am for various backwards compatibility reasons stuck at MacOS 10.15.7 on one machine. And I need to keep an as up-to-date version as possible of MacPorts on it. And once again the ever problematic qt5-qtwebengine gave me a headache.

If you for whatever reason use the newer Xcode 12 (latest version for my system is 12.4), you will probably have the 11.1 SDK installed as well as the 10.14 and 10.15 ones. This means that there are potential issues due to the command xcrun that is used to dig out paths during the qt5-qtwebengine build not pointing to a valid copy of the SDK you need. During the process the command xcrun --sdk macosx --show-sdk-path is invoked and it will result in a path that probably will look like /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.15.sdk. However, if you like me have the "latest and greatest" Xcode installed, it is very likely that this path unfortunately will not contain that SDK but probably look something like:

drwxr-xr-x  - youruser 30 Nov  2020 DriverKit20.2.sdk
drwxr-xr-x  - youruser 30 Nov  2020 MacOSX.sdk
lrwxr-xr-x 10 youruser 28 Apr  2021 MacOSX11.1.sdk -> MacOSX.sdk

This will cause the qt5-qtwebengine build to fail with an error: :info:configure Project ERROR: Could not resolve SDK Path for 'macosx10.15' using --show-sdk-path early on. And unfortunately, it is not enough to just make a softlink, MacOSX10.15.sdk -> MacOSX.sdk, as this will also fail. But there is a fairly simple solution that I used to solve it in the end, that might work for you as well. There is a repository of SDKs at /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs, including the one needed (10.15). So the (possibly slightly dirty) solution I used to solve this issue is to instead make a softlink to that repository thus:

$ ln -s /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX10.15.sdk /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.15.sdk
$ ls -l /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs
drwxr-xr-x  - youruser 30 Nov  2020 DriverKit20.2.sdk
drwxr-xr-x  - youruser 30 Nov  2020 MacOSX.sdk
lrwxr-xr-x 56 youruser 15 Mar 12:51 MacOSX10.15.sdk -> /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX10.15.sdk
lrwxr-xr-x 10 youruser 28 Apr  2021 MacOSX11.1.sdk -> MacOSX.sdk

This allows the build scripts use of xcrun to find what it needs. If you have similar problems on earlier systems, adjust paths accordingly. First test the xcrun --sdk macosx --show-sdk-path to see what it says, and check that path if is valid, and if not, you can try to follow this recipe. YMMV!

As this by now is a quite old OS release, I do not expect everything to be working flawlessly in perpetuity, but if I can help someone with some patchwork here and there to keep things going for as long as possible, I am happy.

[Gandoon (Erik Hedlund)]

The log with the error from before the described manual steps solved the issue.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

See #66113, #63061, #62190.

[Schamschula (Marius Schamschula)]

I ran into the same issue with

macOS 13.6.4 22G513 arm64
Xcode 15.2 15C500b

Executing:  cd "/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_github.com_macports_macports-ports_aqua_qt5/qt5-qtwebengine/work/qtwebengine-5.15.16-lts" && /opt/local/libexec/qt5/bin/qmake PREFIX=/opt/local QMAKE_LINK=/usr/bin/clang++ -spec macx-clang -- -webengine-kerberos -webengine-proprietary-codecs -system-webengine-icu -system-webengine-ffmpeg -feature-webengine-system-gn 
Project ERROR: Could not resolve SDK Path for 'macosx13.3' using --show-sdk-path
Command failed:  cd "/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_github.com_macports_macports-ports_aqua_qt5/qt5-qtwebengine/work/qtwebengine-5.15.16-lts" && /opt/local/libexec/qt5/bin/qmake PREFIX=/opt/local QMAKE_LINK=/usr/bin/clang++ -spec macx-clang -- -webengine-kerberos -webengine-proprietary-codecs -system-webengine-icu -system-webengine-ffmpeg -feature-webengine-system-gn 
Exit code: 3

An updated version of the link got me past the error:

sudo ln -s /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX13.3.sdk /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/