Hi Alexis & John,

At 2026-02-24T14:11:02+1100, John Gardner wrote:
> > I don't know if there's any such thing as running an alternative
> > libc on a macOS/Darwin system--maybe the system crashes; maybe Apple
> > activates a kill switch in your Mac; or maybe things work more or
> > less fine.
> 
> It's actually far worse than any of those possibilities, I'm afraid.

[much snippage; imagine Charlie Sheen "winning" meme here]

> All of these complexities are why building software on OpenBSD makes
> me feel like I'm FLYING. macOS isn't a walled garden, it's a prison
> cell lined with garden-wallpaper.

Heck, running just about any other OS in the world seems like it would
feel like levitating at least a foot off the ground.

At 2026-02-24T11:19:26+0100, Alexis wrote:
[snip]
> Note that $(which printf) will not work reliably as printf can be
> a shell built-in as is the case for macOS' default shell, i.e. zsh.

Yeah, this seems like a tough nut to crack, so I'm inclined to take a
different approach.

I was able to get to a Darwin system via the FSF France's compiler
farm,[1] but unfortunately uchardet isn't installed by default and the
"homebrew environment" that is supposedly available on a temporary basis
seems not to work--I can't "brew install" anything due to permissions
problems, and attempting to "sudo" that doesn't simply refuse my access
(not a surprise), but vomits forth something about a bad gid which looks
to me like the value of a 32-bit UINT_MAX.  So...no idea.

Would you guys try the attached revised "smoke-test.sh" for preconv on
your Darwin system(s)?

Just take the 1.24.0.rc4 distribution archive, unpack it (if it isn't
already), and replace src/preproc/preconv/tests/smoke-test.sh with it.

Please let me know the results.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://portal.cfarm.net/machines/list/

Attachment: smoke-test.sh
Description: Bourne shell script

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