Building GnuCash with GTK-OSX

GnuCash can be built to run more or less natively on OSX -- meaning without X11. Better yet, the build is almost automatic.

Please see http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/MacOSX/Quartz for instructions.

Building the dependencies tarball for CI tests

The Github Mac runners are Apple Silicon so this must be done on an Apple Silicon Mac.

Prerequisites

1. Set up gtk-osx on your system.
2. Clone this repository.
3. Create a build directory and change its ownership to you:

   sudo mkdir -p /Users/runner/gnucash/inst
   sudo chown -R <your userid> /Users/runner
   

Procedure

1. Change the file versions in dependencies.txt to match the versions in the build you just made.
2. Perform the following:

   cd /Users/runner
   jhbuild --prefix /Users/runner/gnucash bootstrap-gtk-osx
   jhbuild --prefix /Users/runner/gnucash --moduleset=/Path/to/gnucash-on-osx/modules/gnucash.modules build meta-gnucash-dependencies
   cd gnucash/inst
   xargs < /Path/to/gnucash-on-osx/dependencies.txt tar -rf ~/gnucash-<version>-mac-dependencies.tar
   jhbuild --prefix /Users/runner/gnucash shell
   xz ~/gnucash-<version>-mac-dependencies.tar
   

Testing the tarball

While still in the jhbuild shell:

cd /Users/runner/gnucash
mkdir parked
mkdir gc-tarball
cd gc-tarball
tar -xf gnucash-<version>-mac-dependencies.tar.xz
cd ../inst
mv lib ../parked
mv include ../parked
mv share ../parked
ln -s /Users/runner/gnucash/gc-tarball/include .
ln -s /Users/runner/gnucash/gc-tarball/lib .
ln -s /Users/runner/gnucash/gc-tarball/share .
cd ../src
git clone https://github.com/gnucash/gnucash
mkdir ../build/gnucash-git && cd ../build/gnucash-git

Configure, build, and test GnuCash. If things go wrong then you need to figure out what's missing, add it to dependencies.txt, regenerate the tarball, untar it in gc-tarball and try again.

Finish up

1. Upload the result to the Dependencies folder in GnuCash's Sourceforge project.
2. Change the dependencies file URI in gnucash-git/.github/workflows/macos-tests.yaml to match the file you just made, commit the result, and push it.
3. Commit and push any changes you made to dependencies.txt.