DISCLAIMER: This is a continuing series detailing the painful story of a DIY render farm build. It is terribly technics and
somewhat frustrating. Those who are unprepared for such “entertainment” are advised to ignore these posts.
Still on the Mac Mini, still trying to make it into a PDC with the Open Source “Dr. Queue.” Scons seems to be fine, and seems to install.
But an attempt to run GTK2 again fails. This was not working. I had to get GTK2 on the machine some other way. I read that GTK2 could also be compiled with GCC 4.2.2, which is a totally separate compiler, apparently supported on Mac, but not necessarily installed. GCC 4.2.2 will build GTK2 under OSX 10.4 but it takes a while. By the way, that sentence is total alphabet soup, and I cannot believe I actually understand what it means. Now I know why Unix-heads sound so impenetrably cryptic. There is jargon everywhere here.
This seemed like a lot of effort to compile GTK2 with a separate compiler, but it was not installing properly, and without it, no GUI, and without that, no render farm.
The sad thing is that GCC also needs to be built, from source. So I had to build a program from source the purpose of which was to build a program that was needed to build a program. The levels of Matroshka dolls required to do this kind of work is a bit dizzying.
Thus I set up the GCC build (retrieving the source was fast and easy). While GCC was building, I noticed that the Dr. Queue instructions for 10.4 also list
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port install pkgconfig
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port install swig
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port install GPK2
Swig seemed to have quite quite a few dependencies, whatever it was. I had done none of these yet, so maybe one of them would dislodge the GTK2 issue.
Scons built successfully, but it had been building successfully all along. I wondered if I should have been rebuilding it again and again. Does it actually rebuild completely, or does it realize that it has already built?