How to install unison from source on macOS

Question

I was wondering whether somebody managed to install unison's latest version from source, on its macOS machine (Here I am trying with Catalina). I followed the steps here :

1. I verified that I had XCode installed (otherwise forget about compiling anything :)

2. I cloned the official Git repository by running

   git clone https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison.git

3. I moved to the newly created directory unison

   cd unison

4. As mentionned in the documentation I then ran the make command telling it to build the text UI:

   make UISTYLE=text

Result should have been an executable file called unisonbut instead of this I got the following error :

Blablabla$ make UISTYLE=text
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/make -C src UISTYLE=text
UISTYLE = text
Building for Unix
NATIVE = true
THREADS = false
STATIC = false
OSTYPE =
OSARCH = osx
ocamlopt: ubase/rx.mli ---> ubase/rx.cmi
ocamlopt -g -unsafe-string -I lwt -I ubase -I system -I fsmonitor -I fsmonitor/linux -I fsmonitor/windows -I system/generic -I lwt/generic -ccopt -mmacosx-version-min=10.6 -c /Users/Shared/unison/src/ubase/rx.mli
make[1]: ocamlopt: No such file or directory
make[1]: *** [ubase/rx.cmi] Error 1
make: *** [text] Error 2

5. I then wondered whether XCode might not carry with him an OCaml compiler. So I installed the official one using MacPort therefore running:

sudo port install ocaml
sudo port install opam

6. I then rerun the same make command

   make UISTYLE=text

7. This time the result looked better and ended with:

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/make tags
if [ -f "`which etags`" ]; then \
        etags *.mli */*.mli *.ml */*.ml */*.m *.c */*.c *.txt \
             *Makefile* \
      ; fi

8. However, still no unison file visible anywhere.

Question is ... since there is no error message, where is this executable?

Answer 1

Re-hello people from the Internet,

I managed to help myself here and got a nice and fresh unison executable on my macOS Catalina computer.

Basically, the base make tries to move the compilation product into /Users/<your_user>/bin/. which makes sense I guess, but is rarely used by us macOS users. So here is what I did to fix the issue :

1. Create the bin directory into your home

   mkdir ~/bin

2. Re run the make by doing

   make UISTYLE=text

3. Verify you have the executable by asking its version:

   ~/bin/unison -version

4. Happy me, I got the expected message back from my terminal:

   unison version 2.51.3 (ocaml 4.08.1)

Hope it can help somebody.