Hi list,

The first bugfix release of Sierra, 10.12.1 is almost out so I'll soon be
doing that yearly dance of upgrading my Mac and Xcode, wiping my jhbuild
tree, and rebuilding everything, fixing build bugs along the way.

I'm motivated to implement changes in gtk-osx-build that will make that
dance a little easier and shorter!

One thing that I spend a lot of time and frustration on every year is
building those modules that aren't really related to GNOME, like gnutls and
the rest of the crypto stack needed to build glib-networking, etc. One
thing I've dreamed about for a long time is using Homebrew to install
those, through jhbuild's <sysdeps> facility. I don't think that's really
realistic as such, for two reasons: 1) it's difficult to get Homebrew to
cooperate with install trees that aren't in /usr/local, and 2) there's no
reverse lookup for Homebrew packages by files that they provide [1].

But, I think it would work fine to use Homebrew to install standalone build
tools, such as pkg-config, xz, bison, flex, etc. They wouldn't have to be
in the jhbuild tree, just in the path, and they usually wouldn't need to be
included in an app bundle.

This would save a lot of time and allow us to offload a lot of maintenance
work to the much larger Homebrew community, as well as help us keep
up-to-date versions of those dependencies.

It could be just an extra step in the instructions / scripts for setting up
gtk-osx-build that installs a bunch of Homebrew packages pre-emptively, or
we could write a <sysdeps> thing that installs Homebrew packages as needed
when building modules.

Homebrew works on 10.5 and up, although 10.5–10.9 are supported only on a
best-effort basis, and you can get it to work on 10.4 using a fork [2].

Would there be any interest in this? Any problems that I'm missing?

[1]
http://superuser.com/questions/781693/how-to-determine-which-brew-package-provides-a-given-file
[2] https://github.com/mistydemeo/tigerbrew
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