Installing irssi via MacPorts on OS X Lion 10.7.1

I’ve floated back and forth between graphical IRC clients and terminal-based clients for a long time. However, I was sad to see that irssi wouldn’t build via MacPorts on OS X Lion. During the build, I saw quite a few errors from the compiler:

-E, -S, -save-temps and -M options are not allowed with multiple -arch flags

Sure enough, when I looked at the lines in the output, both x86_64 and i386 were passed to the compiler:

... -pipe -O2 -arch x86_64 -arch i386 -fno-common ...

I opened a ticket in trac and began looking for a workaround. Another trac ticket (from four years ago) on the MacPorts site gave some pointers on how to work around the bug for a previous version.

I changed up the instructions a bit since we’re not dealing with the ppc architecture any longer:

sudo port -v clean irssi +perl
sudo port -v configure irssi +perl
cd /opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_tarballs_ports_irc_irssi/irssi/work/
sudo find . -type f -exec sed -i "" -e "s/-arch i386//g" {} \;
cd
sudo port -v install irssi +perl

The build worked!

$ irssi -v
irssi 0.8.15 (20100403 1617)