Re: Mac OS X Leopard and conftest.dSYM directories

[Jeff Squyres]

Ralf -- thanks for reporting this; I had a hectic week and could not  
get to this issue before now.  We noticed this issue in the context of  
the Open MPI project (my laptop is a MacBook, just recently upgraded  
to Leopard).  Note that I am *not* an OS X expert!

Here's the smallest configure.ac in which I was able to make it happen:

-----
AC_INIT([leopard-.dsym-test], [1.0])
AC_PROG_CC
AC_TRY_LINK([], [])
-----

If you run it, you'll see a conftest.dSYM left over when configure is  
done.  Dissecting this a little more, it appears that passing -g and  
any flavor of -O (even -O0) to the Leopard built-in gcc will result in  
one of these .dSYM directories:

# Just to be sure...
$ rm -rf *.dSYM
$ cat > mytest.c <<EOF
int main() { return 0; }
EOF
$ gcc -g -O mytest.c
$ ls -ld *.dSYM
a.out.dSYM

Hope this helps!



On Nov 10, 2007, at 6:37 AM, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:

> Hello there,
>
> Jeff Squyres reported that on Mac OS X Leopard, some configure tests
> create spurious warnings of the form:
>
>  rm: conftest.dSYM: is a directory
>
> It seems either the compiler or the linker, or both, create these
> directories and do not remove them again.  I do not know the details,
> for example whether compiler flags are needed to provoke this, and do
> not have access to this system.  Some Libtool and some Autoconf tests
> are affected.  Just searching the net for the warning reveals issues.
>
> I remember that, in the past, when we made the removal patterns more
> generous, we hit issues with third party macros that tried to inspect
> generated file after/in the test, which makes me reluctant to suggest
> to blindly change `rm -f conftest*' to `rm -rf conftest*' everywhere.
>
> Further, I fail to find useful information about *.dSYM directories on
> developer.apple.com, all I can see talks about files named that way.
>
> Any chance somebody could help here?  For example, if you have a  
> Leopard
> system, it would help to see verbose output of git Autoconf's  
> testsuite,
> to be able to find out which Autoconf macros are affected:
>  make check TESTSUITEFLAGS='-v -x'
>
> (both stdout and stderr).  This is going to be quite large, so please
> pack it with bzip2 or so.
>
> Cheers, and thanks,
> Ralf


--
Jeff Squyres
Cisco Systems