Creating Darcs Mac OS X static builds

This post explains how to create a distributable `static’ Darcs build. This is not the only way, and probably not the cleanest either. If you have suggestions on how to make this page better, or if parts are unclear or don’t work, feel free to tell me.

Right now, I only provide instructions on how to make a binary that runs on all Mac OS X platforms that are the same or more recent than the build platform. So, if you compile Darcs on Mac OS X 10.3, the resulting binary will run on both 10.3 and 10.4. However, if 10.4 is your build platform, the binary will only run on 10.4.

I will be assuming that you have the latest version of GHC (>=6.6) installed. These instructions have been tested with GHC 6.6 and Darcs 1.0.9rc2.

However, since Curl provides better support for using Darcs over HTTP, the remainder of this document will explain how to include Curl without losing distributability.

After downloading and extracting the latest tarball of Curl, configure it without the extras by running

Now, run make to build Darcs. The result should be your own `static’ version of Darcs. To make sure that it does not depend on non-standard libraries, use otool as above.