update on macosx build support for mlvm

[John Rose]

Folks, you probably noticed that I pushed some patches called macosx-7113349.patch.

These are a preview of Michael McMahon's excellent and much-needed work transferring macosx build support to JDK8.

With these changes, it is possible to build again on macosx.  (Those who build on Mac have surely noticed that building has been increasingly unreliable in recent weeks.)

Here is a message I just sent that discusses this:
  http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/macosx-port-dev/2012-March/003474.html

Here's the summary.  To build on macosx, you can adjust previous build procedures as follows:

1. Upgrade to Lion; download Xcode; install the command line tools.
2. Set LP64=1.  (Avoid 32-bit builds, at least for now.)
3. Add Michael's patches to jdk.  (Crucial!)
4. Set ALT_BOOTDIR to a download of OpenJDK 7 preview on macosx: http://jdk7.java.net/macportpreview/
5. Remove ALT_FREETYPE_* settings from the build script.
6. Find the compilers using xcrun:  CC=$(  xcrun -find gcc ); CXX=$( xcrun -find g++ )
7. Set OPENJDK=true for luck.  (Not sure if this is necessary.)

I don't know whether the upgrade to Lion and LP64 is necessary for everyone, but I hoped it would simplify my life, and it has.  (New Mail UI took some getting used to.)

If you want to join a discussion of the support (or non-support) for JDK on Snowleopard and 32-bit JDK builds, this is a good one:
  http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk7u-dev/2012-February/002024.html
  http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk7u-dev/2012-March/002079.html

Best wishes,
— John