I just wasted many hours trying to figure out why libswish3 failed to pass all tests on 10.6.

This link explains what I figured out to be true the hard way:

10.6 is now a mainsream 64bit OS !

10.5 a 64bit capable 32bit OS !

If I forced 32bit compile all is well:

CFLAGS=”-m32 -O2 -g” ./configure && make test

While I would like to figure out how to compile as a native 64bit app, my MacBook has too many libs from before the 10.5 to 10.6 upgrade to trust that all the dep chain is 64bit compat.

The error I was seeing was the noxious BAD_ADDRESS error which traced back to some libxml2 hash features. Red herring. Of course, I had to recompile libxml2 with the -m32 as well so that everything was 32bit compatible. Took me hours before I noticed that the older working version on the same box was about half the size of the new version… which triggered the ol’ 32-vs-64-bit thing in my brain.

Update: In the end this was a bug in libswish3 with confusing naming of some variables. But the 64-bit thing was a Good Thing To Realize.