Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Jiro Fujita <[email protected]> · Thu, 17 Nov 2016 10:01:36 -0600

Xiaoqiang, 

The flat-namespace variable has to do with XQuartz 2.7.10 release and on.  Apparently, in XQuartz 2.7.9, libXt was no longer linked to flat_namespace, which caused a number of issues to some X11 based software.  The developers of XQuartz didn’t even have libXt unlinked to flat_namespace in the release candidate of XQuartz 2.7.10 early on, but they reversed the decision on that.  So, if you have done this 3 years ago, it would not have been the problem.  

When this thread initially started earlier in the fall by Eric Norum, XQuartz was not capable of dealing with it correctly (at least in conjunction with OpenMotif installed by HomeBrew), whereas when I installed XQuartz when flat_namespace was still working just fine (about a year ago).  That got broken at some point, when I upgraded the OS and XQuartz on my Mac, just as Eric had an issue (except that I didn’t even realized that until he contacted me via private e-mail).  But after spending about a day or two, I eventually figure out the problem has to do with the flat_namespace.  

> On Nov 17, 2016, at 9:52 AM, Wang Xiaoqiang <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hi Lewis,
> 
> Last time (3 years ago) during the fresh installation, I did not remember tuning for flat_namespace variant.
> 
> But I will keep this in mind in case of I need to make a fresh install.
> Thanks.
> 
> Best
> Xiaoqiang
> 
> 
> On 11/17/2016 04:43 PM, J. Lewis Muir wrote:
>> On 11/17, Wang Xiaoqiang (PSI) wrote:
>>> Hi Lewis,
>>> 
>>> After checking, my medm is linked only to MacPorts libraries.
>> 
>> Hi, Xiaoqiang.
>> 
>> OK, thanks for confirming.
>> 
>>> As you said, the key issue is the flat_namespace flag. Luckily
>>> Macports handles that automatically if the xorg-libXt is installed as
>>> a dependency to openmotif.
>> 
>> I'm not a MacPorts expert, but my understanding is that it does *not*
>> handle that automatically.  If you update your local ports tree and
>> rebuild, I think it will fail on x11/openmotif because x11/xorg-libXt
>> was not built as a flat-namespace shared library.  In order to build
>> x11/xorg-libXt as a flat-namespace shared library, you will need to
>> enable the flat_namespace variant for x11/xorg-libXt.  That doesn't
>> happen automatically.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> 
>> Lewis
>> 

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System