[Haskell-cafe] XCode Dependency for HP on Mac

[Mark Lentczner]

Hiho - I'm the maintainer of the Mac installer for HP. I thought I'd
chime in a bit:

On Mac OS X, "developer tools" is essentially synonymous with "Xcode".
That is, to get the set of standard utilities needed for development
on compiled executables (notably the "binutils"), you install Xcode.
True, it also includes the IDE called Xcode, but the vast bulk of that
installation are things like headers, link libraries, command line
tools, and other utilities for development of compiled executables in
general.

As several have pointed out, you can download Xcode for free. If you
have Lion, you can get Xcode 4 for free from the Mac Store. Xcode 3
for 10.6 and 10.5. Traditionally, Apple has included Xcode on one of
the CD-ROMs that came with a new computer, and/or as an installer
already present on the hard disk. (I haven't bought a new Air...
yet... but perhaps someone can check to see if the Xcode installer is
one the SSD volume already?)

It is conceivably possible to build and distribute some of those
tools, but not the whole bundle. But the difficulty of getting such a
build just right, and all the pieces in the right place, seems absurd
to attempt to recreate when Apple has done it, and gives it away for
free. Apple's versions of bintools also includes many extensions extra
options for the OS X environment (like supporting multi-arch binaries)
Finally, there is also licensing questions regarding the parts
supplied by the OS vendor (headers, stub libs, debug libs, etc....)

Given the above, perhaps it is a little more clear why we choose to
not include the system development tools in the Haskell Platform
installer.

- Mark