Building and Installing on macOS

Install Prerequisites

You should backup your machine regularly, and confirm you have made a full backup before proceeding.

These instructions assume you are using MacPorts, an open source community initiative to provide a way to build and install open source software on a Mac, and handle their dependencies.

Please follow instructions on installing MacPorts at https://www.macports.org.

Caveat emptor: Remember in our License we are not responsible if this stuff screws up your computer or fails to work in the expected way for whatever reason.

Make sure you’ve got Xcode installed (Apple’s developer tools; they’re free. You can install it from Apple’s App Store.)

Then install MacPorts for the version of macOS that you’re using/building for.

Bring MacPorts Up to Date

You’ll want to update MacPorts config to the latest, using its selfupdate feature, and upgrade any installed ports.

sudo port selfupdate

This next part feels a wee bit dangerous in that it might break some of your ports, but it’s cool. It’ll update all your installed ports, and their dependencies, to the latest version it can:

sudo port upgrade outdated

You can use port outdated to see what ports need updating.

Install Python

Install python and select it. If you expect python to start Python 2 instead of Python 3, don’t execute the line below that sets python to point to python39.

sudo port install python39
sudo port select --set python python39
sudo port select --set python3 python39
sudo port install py39-setuptools

Install Tcl

The commands below will install Tcl and a number of widely used packages. You can, of course, install all the Tcl stuff you want.

Install Autoconf

Install autoconf, a little bit older version than the absolute latest, because autoconf 2.71 changed stuff quite a bit and the Tcl Extension Architecture (TEA) autoconf stuff that TOhil uses hasn’t yet been updated to work with it, so if you try to use 2.71 to create the configure script, it’ll fail with a whole bunch of errors.

Run Autoconf

From the tohil top-level directory, run autoconf264. Like many Unix command line tools, it will produce no output if everything worked.

Run the Configure Script

It shouldn’t be necessary to specify –exec-prefix, but it seems to be. We could use some help on this.

…then make and make install:

Make

There’s README.macOS and README.MacPorts files in the top-level tohil directory that might have some useful info in them.