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Installing fxscintilla on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

In trying to install rb-fxruby from Darwinports, I ran up against a problem with the linker when trying to build fxscintilla, which reported:

ld: flag: -undefined dynamic_lookup can't be used with
MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET environment variable set to: 10.1
/usr/bin/libtool: internal link edit command failed
make[1]: *** [libfxscintilla.la] Error 1
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

and it turns out the solution is to set up your shell environment to include MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET set to 10.4, so for all you bash users,

export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET="10.4"

and then the build works like a charm. This is related to the concept of weak linking under Mac OS X, which allows code that was built and linked on 10.4 to still work on 10.3, providing the libraries export the same symbols. There is more in this Apple Tech Note.