Build: DBus on MacOS

On macOS, the default Qt installation includes QtDBus, but not the DBus library that it depends on. Pre-built binaries are available in the externals repository. This howto documents the steps if you want to build a new version of DBus binaries.

Building from source

• Download and extract the libdbus source code.
• Set the deployment target to the lowest supported Mac OS version. At the time of writing, this was Mac OS 10.10

export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.10

• Configure, run and install the build

./configure --localstatedir=/usr/local/var --sysconfdir=/usr/local/etc --disable-xml-docs --disable-doxygen-docs --enable-launchd --with-launchd-agent-dir=~/Library/LaunchAgents --without-x --disable-tests
make
make install

• make install will automatically copy org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist into the users LaunchAgents directory. So from the next boot up, it will be automatically loaded. To load it without rebooting after installation, run:

load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist

Commit to externals

Before committing the new binaries to externals, we need to make some small adjustments to the library lookup path written in those binaries.

• Setup swiftRoot environmental variable

export swiftRoot=[path to your swift root]

• First copy them to externals to not change the local installation

cp /usr/local/bin/dbus-daemon $swiftRoot/externals/macx-clang/bin64/
cp /usr/local/bin/dbus-uuidgen  $swiftRoot/externals/macx-clang/bin64/
cp /usr/local/lib/libdbus-1.3.dylib $swiftRoot/externals/macx-clang/lib64/

• Change the path where dbus executables should look for 'libdbus-1.3.dylib':

cd $swiftRoot/externals/macx-clang/bin64
install_name_tool -change /usr/local/lib/libdbus-1.3.dylib @executable_path/../lib/libdbus-1.3.dylib dbus-daemon
install_name_tool -change /usr/local/lib/libdbus-1.3.dylib @executable_path/../lib/libdbus-1.3.dylib dbus-uuidgen

cd $swiftRoot/externals/macx-clang/lib64
install_name_tool -id @rpath/libdbus-1.3.dylib libdbus-1.3.dylib

• Commit the new binaries