I have been a Unix System Administrator for many years, and in factwould be quite capable of testing, compiling, or generating object code on my Intel Mac for the benefit of the community.
That would be great. I spent some time working up instructions for how to get a build environment built on MacOS for D-RATS. If you follow those instructions (aside from the bit about building D-RATS) you should be able to at least run it on your system. From there, I'll need to make some tweaks to the build system to get it to create a .app package. The instructions are here:
http://www.d-rats.com/wiki/MacOSXBuildNotes
My understanding of the current Apple Development Kit is that you cangenerate Intel based code on the PPC, whether it is "Universal" code for any target processor (PPC or Intel), or Intel specific (and optimized) code that is intended for only the Intel chip. Now I understand this is mostly written in Python, anyway, but, just some food for thought here.
That's true, Xcode can produce universal binaries, but that's only half the story. All of the code you compile must be endian safe in order to run on both platforms. Not all of the packages needed are safe and thus it's necessary to build one for each.
CHIRP and D-RATS are written in Python, but require a substantial set of additional libraries to run (GTK being one you have already identified). Further, the Python included with MacOS is quite old, so a new one is built along the way.
I saw where someone was speaking of a ".19" version (beta?) but giventhe open source nature of the software, was surprised to not see it on the download site.
You can get the latest beta that I'm working on here:
http://chirp.danplanet.com/download/beta
I have been extremely busy lately and thus haven't done much work on CHIRP, but I need to get back into it.
One thing I had been working on was a decoder for reading the code plug from an "ICF" file. Now that I see this software is here, I would be willing to try to integrate that into Chirp such that we could at least read and for sure try to shoot for writing "ICF" files compatible with the ICOM software for Windows.
CHIRP can read ICF files generated from the mobile radios already by actually turning them directly into .img files. Exporting them is a little harder because there is some extra gorp at the end of the memory image that I don't know about yet. Further, the ICF files for the handhelds are a different beast altogether.
If you get the environment built and CHIRP running, let me know and we'll move forward with the .app build changes.
Thanks!