Building Scid

NOTE: The instructions in this page asume that you are familiar with working in the terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app).

Building for Private Use

You can get Scid as a nice Mac Application, the steps to follow are the next (actual commands are between parenthesis):

  1. On Tiger the installation of X11.app is optional, make sure that you have it.
  2. Snow Leopard comes with Tcl/Tk 8.5 (but it might not work), for previous versions or if your default version doesn't work you will need Tcl/Tk 8.5 installed, look down for instructions.
  3. Xcode is also needed, get it from the Apple Developer Connection site, requires a free registration.
  4. Download the Scid source and extract the files.
  5. Change to the scid source directory ( cd path/to/source/of/scid/ )
  6. Rename Makefile.conf to Makefile.conf.bak ( mv Makefile.conf Makefile.conf.bak )
  7. Rename Makefile.conf.darwin to Makefile.conf ( mv Makefile.conf.darwin Makefile.conf )
  8. Run 'configure' ( ./configure )
  9. Compile the application ( make scid_app )
  10. You can find the application Scid.app in the folder 'dist', move it to your Applications folder.
  11. Enjoy!

Building for Public Release

Scid 3.6.26 is the last release that works with Tcl/Tk 8.4, starting with Scid 3.7, Tcl/Tk 8.5 is required. Since Tcl/Tk Aqua 8.4 is the default version on Mac OS X and the fresh installation of Tcl/Tk Aqua 8.5 doesn't let us build Scid, building Scid on Mac is a bit difficult for the average Mac user.

I managed to build universal Scid binaries with the Tcl/Tk Aqua frameworks embedded into the application bundle, those are the files I make available here. Since Tcl/Tk is embedded into the application itself, it can run on any Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 or later regardless of the version of Tcl/Tk installed.

Please, keep in mind that the scripts I provide in the next section, were written to be used with Tcl/Tk Aqua 8.5 under Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5, any other distribution or version might not work without modifying the scripts first. Also, if you don't understand what every line of every script does, I recommend that you don't use them, you might not be able to fix any problem they could cause.

Getting ready

First, you need to get some things ready:

Create customized SDK

The original MacOSX10.4u.sdk doesn't work (for this case), you need to create some symlinks that point to the Tcl/Tk 8.5 frameworks. For this you need to run 'makeSDK.sh'

(cd /path/to/scid/source && sudo makeSDK.sh), after that you should see 'MacOSX10.4uTclTk8.5.sdk' inside '/Developer/SDKs/'.

Compile and create DMG

Rename "Makefile.conf.darwin" inside the scid folder to "Makefile.conf", then run './configure'. Now you need to patch the new Makefile with "patch -p0 < universal.patch" from the zip. (mv -f Makefile.conf.darwin Makefile.conf && ./configure && \\\npatch -p0 < universal.patch)

After that, you are ready to build Scid, just type "make scid_dmg" and you should get a DMG file ready for distribution.

Install Tcl/Tk Aqua 8.5

Download Tcl/Tk Aqua and install it. Try to build Scid and if it fails, download this zip file and extract the script 'switchTclTk.sh' and run it (sudo switchTclTck.sh)[NOTE: since Scid 4.0, running this script might not be necesary].

I haven't been able to build Scid from a fresh install of Tcl/Tk Aqua, so 'switchTclTk.sh' sets everything as needed.