Cannot make erlang install with wxwidgets on mac

[nicnilov]

As it sometimes happens, an uncontrolled brew upgrade seems to have messed up the compatibility of the asdf-installed packages.

I use asdf to install Erlang, however the wxwidgets, openssl, and some other dependencies, as well as asdf itself, are installed by brew.
I had Erlang 27.1.2 installed for quite some time, and recently discovered that the :observer doesn't start anymore, crashing complaining about missing a wx binary.

Trying to resolve this I attempted several reinstalls, building various versions of wxwidgets, including in interactive mode with the --enable-compat30, etc. Similarly I built erlang with many combinations of switches in its KERL_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS. Even though sometimes I was able to go through with the installation itself, the resulting setup was not working. The :observer was still failing to start with various issues still pointing to wxwidgets. Finally I decided to give up and uninstalled the asdf's erlang versions and the plugin itself, as well as whatever custom-built wxwidgets I had in brew, and reinstalled everything from brew via brew install erlang@27. This was what finally fixed the installation and :observer started working. However now my build tools are interspersed between asdf and brew, and the erlang version switching became more difficult.

This is not the first time I'm having issues with this plugin and asdf in general after its transition to brew. Last upgrade round also required some manual fiddling with erlang build flags, etc. I don't know if this is related, but when asdf was just a plain cloned repo, it used to work very well and was stable between the upgrades. Now that the result is an inconsistent install of things in random places I think I'm going to look for another solution beyond asdf.

[nicnilov]

Here is my workaround.

I needed elixir 1.17.3-otp-27 to work with erlang 27.3.4.2 and elixir 1.18.4-otp-28 with erlang 28.0.2. Since I couldn't find a way to install erlang via asdf, I had to do that via brew:

brew install erlang@27
brew install erlang  # this currently installs version 28

Then I had to manually create asdf shims for the erlang versions. Before that I needed to make sure asdf erlang plugin is installed:

asdf plugin add erlang

Now under the ~/.asdf/installs/ directory:

# make sure erlang installs directory exists
mkdir -p erlang && cd erlang

# make an entry for Erlang 27, symlinking it to the brew-installed version
mkdir -p 27.3.4.2 && cd 27.3.4.2
ln -s /opt/homebrew/opt/erlang@27/bin ~/.asdf/installs/erlang/27.3.4.2/bin

# back to the erlang installs dir
cd ..

# make an entry for Erlang 28, symlinking it to the brew-installed version
mkdir -p 28.0.2 && cd 28.0.2
ln -s /opt/homebrew/opt/erlang/bin ~/.asdf/installs/erlang/28.0.2/bin

# create the asdf erlang shims
asdf reshim erlang 27.3.4.2
asdf reshim erlang 28.0.2

At this point it should become possible to switch the Elixir versions as usual via the .tool-versions file.

This of course is not a maintainable solution since the next brew upgrade ... may update the installed minor versions of Erlang which will break the config. However, as a short term approach it is better than nothing.