Someone finally managed to fire up a Sophie app http://www.opensophie.org/ on Snow Leopard and immediately found an issue that also affects Squeak users who do fascinating things with FFI The innocent FFI call was
apifstat: afileNo statBuffer: buffer <cdecl: long 'fstat' (long MacStat* ) module: 'libc.dylib'> ^self externalCallFailed
Now it seems BEFORE Snow Leopard *somehow* the Squeak external primitive call api which is part of the VM to assist in loading plugins or finding function entry points in executable binaries or libraries would return the entry point for fstat by *somehow* finding libc.dylib which is via /usr/lib/libc.dylib -> libSystem.dylib -> libSystem.B.dylib
Interestingly this is found implicitly since the mac carbon vm lookup logic never looks in /usr/lib/
Now in Snow Leopard it seems they do less implicit searching, perhaps a security concern? Then it fails.
In the past the Unix VM would search a hundred(sic) more places, but I understand less today, but it might still work? Maybe /usr/lib is in the hit list?
This issue also applies to Alien because it calls back to the VM for it to find the module and function entry point.
Since I have received a request to ensure that doing an explicit full path should be allowed in the squeak carbon macintosh vm. Then a change would be:
apifstat: afileNo statBuffer: buffer <cdecl: long 'fstat' (long MacStat* ) module: '/usr/lib/libc.dylib'> ^self externalCallFailed
I'll look at doing this shortly.
However the workaround is to go to Sophie.app/Contents/Resources and do a ln -s /usr/lib/libc.dylib libc.dylib to create a symbolic link in the Resources directory for libc.dylib since we do explicitly look for libc.dylib in the Resources directory.
Obviously if you have a FFI call like above where you are calling a system library Oracle? for example. You might find it no longer works with Snow Leopard on the Macintosh, so you should check.
-- = = = ======================================================================== John M. McIntosh johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com Twitter: squeaker68882 Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com = = = ========================================================================