[Rivet] Mac Rivet install guidelines

[James Monk]

On 11 Jun 2009, at 14:48, Andy Buckley wrote:

> while doing this, and since there are so many Mac users here at Les
> Houches (and in HEP in general) I think it's important to keep this up
> to date. Can some of you Macinisti take a look and bring it up to date
> (and check if that attached mkGenserArea script is valid)?

Jon and I tested the svn head of mkGenserArea the other day and it  
works for both of us after a few (not OS X) tweaks to get Jimmy  
installed.  I've just committed that to svn, so I'll edit the wiki to  
suggest people use that.

What tends to happen is I fix up the mkGenser script to build a Genser  
area on my laptop and then merrily go about using that setup for  
months until someone complains that the script doesn't work because of  
changes made for the benefit of that other operating system.  Since I  
don't want to be re-installing Genser every time a minor change is  
made there might be something to be said for forking a dedicated mac  
version right now to avoid breaking it again.

>  (and I don't ''want'' to encourage use
> of old versions!).

That's old(er) versions of OS X, not Rivet.  You own shares in Apple?   
10.3 is ancient history and I think it's fair enough we don't support  
it, but it's not unreasonable that someone might be using 10.4.  The  
only extra work they need to do is install a more modern autotools -  
maybe move those instructions to a separate page?

Finally, I have put a pre-compiled Genser for OS X area at

	http://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/~jmonk/genser/

I've got no idea as to its portability (compiled i386 32 bit on  
10.6) , so perhaps you could find a guinea pig with a virgin Mac at  
Les Houches to try it.

James