IDL 8.1 Workbench crashing on Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8

THIS INFORMATION ONLY PERTAINS TO SOFTWARE VERSIONS IDL 8.5, ENVI 5.3 AND PRIOR

Topic:

There is a known problem in which the IDL workbench fails to launch on Mac OS X 10.7.2. As of 10/31/2011, There are a few of scenarios in which this problem occurs:

1) The user upgrades directly from 10.6 to 10.7.2 (skipping 10.7.0 and 10.7.1)
2) The user downloads 10.7.2 form the Apple store
3) The user re-installs Mac OS X Lion using the new network install/repair functionality (done via Cmd+R at reboot)
4) The user buys a new Apple machine with Mac OS X 10.7.2 already installed

If the user installed Mac OS X 10.7.2 using any of the methods listed above, the IDL 8 workbench may not launch on his or her system. If the user upgrades to Mac OS X 10.7.2 from 10.7.0 or 10.7.1, then the IDL 8 workbench should work without problems.

If you are using Mac OS X 10.7.3 then the workbench crashes will likely occur unless you have performed the workaround shown in this article (even if you upgraded from 10.7.0 or 10.7.1).


NOTE: Mac OS X Lion is not a supported platform for IDL 8.0 and 8.1.

UPDATE (11/15/2012): This problem might also happen with later versions of Mac OS X, such as 10.7.4, 10.7.5, and 10.8 (Mountain Lion).

Discussion:

If you download Mac OS X 10.7.2 directly from the Apple store or through Apple's new network recovery/reinstall feature, the IDL 8 workbench may fail to launch on your system. These crashes may also occur on Mac OS X 10.7.3. Typically on these systems, when you start the workbench, the IDL splash page will appear, and the scroll bar at the bottom of the page will reach the end. At this point, a Problem Report window will appear, and the workbench will crash. A sample from a Problem Report generated by this issue can be found at the bottom of the page. If you started the workbench inside the terminal, a segmentation fault will likely occur as shown below:

bash-3.2$ idlde
Segmentation fault: 11
bash-3.2$

Workaround:

If you are experiencing this issue, you can work around this problem by renaming IDL's curl libraries. To do this, please use the following procedure:

1) If you are running any instances of IDL, please shut them down.

2) Open a terminal window and navigate to the /bin/bin.darwin.x86_64 directory. For example, if you are using IDL 8.1 installed in the Applications directory, type the following command:

cd /Applications/itt/idl/idl81/bin/bin.darwin.x86_64

3) Rename the following three files: libcurl.4.0.1.dylib, libcurl.4.dylib and libcurl.dylib. For example,

mv libcurl.4.0.1.dylib libcurl.4.0.1.dylib.bak mv libcurl.4.dylib libcurl.4.dylib.bak mv libcurl.dylib libcurl.dylib.bak

If your login does not have adequate permissions to make these changes,
you may need to issue the commands with "sudo" privileges. For example:

sudo mv ./libcurl.4.0.1.dylib libcurl.4.0.1.dylib.bak sudo mv ./libcurl.4.dylib libcurl.4.dylib.bak sudo mv ./libcurl.dylib libcurl.dylib.bak

4) Restart IDL. If it still fails to launch, try restarting your system.

The procedure described above is a workaround to get up and running. IDL should still be able to load the version of these libraries provided the OS using the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH variable. IDL's URL object, JPIP and some OGC functionality have been tested with the libraries renamed and all tests passed. Hence, it should be safe for to rename the curl libraries from the bin.darwin.x86_64 directory.

Example Error Message:

Below is a sample from an Apple Problem Report generated because of this problem. This is just the beginning of the report; it is actually much longer.

Process: idlde [24361] Path: /Applications/itt/*/idlde.darwin.x86_64.app/Contents/MacOS/idlde Identifier: org.eclipse.eclipse Version: 3.5 (3.5) Code Type: X86-64 (Native) Parent Process: launchd [198] Date/Time: 2011-11-03 15:29:46.789 -0600 OS Version: Mac OS X 10.7.2 (11C74) Report Version: 9 Interval Since Last Report: 528677 sec Crashes Since Last Report: 4 Per-App Interval Since Last Report: 23 sec Per-App Crashes Since Last Report: 1 Anonymous UUID: 6B5A61E6-0140-434C-AC40-B935C03DC6AA Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000000 VM Regions Near 0: --> __TEXT 0000000100000000-0000000100004000 [ 16K] r-x/rwx SM=COW /Applications/itt/*/idlde.darwin.x86_64.app/Contents/MacOS/idlde Application Specific Information: objc[24361]: garbage collection is OFF Java information: Exception type: Bus Error (0xa) at pc=00000000 Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (20.1-b02-383 mixed mode macosx-amd64) Current thread (103801800): JavaThread "main" [_thread_in_native, id=1932147040, stack(7fff5f400000,7fff5fc00000)] Stack: [7fff5f400000,7fff5fc00000] ...