Lazarus and FreePascal on Mac OS 26.3 Tahoe is a disaster

[wpostma]

It was bad news that FreePascal's most recent (5 years ago) binary got dropped from Debian, where 1980s fortune versions are still around, but ... on Mac OS Tahoe,   you can't even build Lazarus, or install and run any released binary, on Mac OS Tahoe.

There kind of needs to be a bit of a dev focus on that I think. I'll try to help if I can.

[Thaddy]

What are your problems, step by step, because I do not have any. (I had a lot, though). I only can vouch for M4 hardware, though.
And FPC binaries are not dropped from Debian yet, not from releases. The work for that has been/is being done by adapting the packaging to GTK3 and communicating that the inclusion of GTK2 libraries is not used in the core, but for legacy support and that is legal. I have heared that is more or less already accepted.
The age of the release does not matter to Debian, it never has, as long as GTK2 is removed and there is maintenance.
Anyway the version for the M series can't be 5 years old yet, because the M series did not yet exist apart from the M1 which was sold alongside Intel hardware that was also still in production.
Fpc's release for M1/Aarch64 is 3.2.2 and dates from May 20th, 2021.
(Ok,Ok, almost 5 years)

Most issues stem not from the compiler, but from the tools anyway.

[dbannon]

It was bad news that FreePascal's most recent (5 years ago) binary got dropped from Debian, ....

No, that is not the case. See attached screen dumps from Synaptic. FPC322 and Lazarus 4.6 exist in Debian Sid. In fact the Debian people have put a lot of work into providing both a GTK3 and a Qt5 version of Lazarus. Trust me, you will be heaps happier with the Qt5 one. If Apple where to put one percent of that effort into making transitions between OS versions smoother, the very many similar titled threads here would not exist.

Davo

[jwdietrich]

For me, it works; see https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/File:Lazarus_4.6_on_macOS_Tahoe_26.4.png for an example. What are your specific problems?

[Thaddy]

I asked the same thing, no answer yet.

Can you please show us Warren?
If we know your problems we can help.

[mischi]

fpc 3.2.2 and Lazarus 4.4 installed using macports work fine on my arm MacBook on Tahoe. According to the macports buildbots fpc 3.2.2 runs fine all way down to 10.8 (https://ports.macports.org/port/fpc/details/) and lazarus down to 10.15 (https://ports.macports.org/port/lazarus/details/).

[Enos68]

It is a bit of a shame that when you try to use the official Lazarus downloads from Sourceforge.net, which claimed to be 4.6 version with FPC 3.2.4RC1, which pair should be solving the -macosx_version_min linker error problem. It turns out the Lazarus is 4.4 and you cannot compile the app due to the error not solved at all.

From MacPorts the same 4.4 Lazarus and FPC 3.2.2 is working just fine.

While I really appreciate what the community is doing to keep this language alive and provide a tool for cross-platform development it said that a major platform like MacOS is not supported enough and an external solution need to be found to get it properly working on MacOS.

XCode is changing every year and the team should be ready for those changes to keep Lazarus and Free Pascal working from the official download. Developers cannot wait years for such solutions.

[Thaddy]

I build from source, trunk/main, and there are no problems I am aware of.
Also building with fpcupdeluxe works just fine if you want to use automated builds. My hardware is an M4 mini.