Developing Crawl on OS X

Having never used Xcode (but having worked on games in a few other
development environments), I figured building and poking around crawl
would be a good way to learn about both. After an evening of
experimentation, I have a few questions -- most of which I think are
crawl related.

I'm assuming that at least some of the dev team works in OS X; if not,
the answer to "why doesn't this work?" is pretty obvious Anyway.

I wasn't able to get the Debug and Dev builds to run; they died
immediately with an illegal instruction (at first I thought I was just
trying to start the debugger incorrectly :-/) It looks like turning
off ZeroLink fixes the problem -- is this supposed to work?

Unicode support doesn't build out of the box (missing an include in
libunix). There were some reports that the os x ncurses also included
ncursesw functionality, but a unicode build obviously didn't work.
Linking against a MacPorts ncursesw is better; but each of iTerm and
Terminal.app display their own issues (iTerm seems to let some escape
codes through, Terminal.app shows many glyphs fullwidth). Is this
known to work, given a non-buggy terminal emulator?

Building and debugging within Xcode does not work so well; the output
window has no xterm-like behavior which makes it hard to play. Is the
standard workflow to start crawl in a term window and attach with gdb
once it's running? Or is there some cleverness that allows you to
spawn off a terminal running crawl, and have gdb automatically attach
to that?

I suppose a better idea would be to file tracker items... I just don't
want to do that if it's likely to be user error.

thanks!
p

Paul Du Bois wrote:

> Having never used Xcode (but having worked on games in a few other
> development environments), I figured building and poking around crawl
> would be a good way to learn about both. After an evening of
> experimentation, I have a few questions -- most of which I think are
> crawl related.
>
> I'm assuming that at least some of the dev team works in OS X; if not,
> the answer to "why doesn't this work?" is pretty obvious

I've talked to Nat, who is doing the Mac stuff in the team. His reply:
"You seem to be trying to build on OS X 10.4, which isn't really supported
anymore. I'm happy to try and help them if they can pop onto our discuss
list, but unfortunately I just don't have time for Usenet anymore."

So take that as an invitation.

David