install_name_tool and Universal Binaries

With Apple moving to Apple Silicon for all of their new products, software developers are having to figure out how to support both Intel and Apple Silicon devices. Like some of our customers, you may not be ready to move to Apple Silicon. Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily exempt you from dealing with universal binaries, especially when it comes to third party dependencies.

One of our customers has recently started to see the following error in their package builds for macOS:

The customer project packages the SciPy python module and, as part of the packaging step, it uses install_name_tool to strip away any unwanted RPATHs.

If we read the error message closely, we can see that the path /usr/local/lib  is not found "for architecture arm64." We don't care about Apple Silicon for this project, so why is this affecting us?

It turns out that SciPy has started distributing universal binaries -- binaries that support both Intel (x86_64) and Apple Silicon (arm64) architectures:

We can't make install_name_tool  ignore the missing path for arm64. Instead, we can strip away the unwanted arm64 parts, making install_name_tool happy with our request:

Now we've seen how a new architecture that we don't yet support has affected an existing application. As universal binaries are becoming more pervasive in our dependency chains, we expect to see more of this kind of problem in the future. However, the tooling aims to resolve these kinds of issues. We hope that our simple solution helps anyone else who encounters this kind of issue.

Our consulting and troubleshooting services extend across the full stack at any level of integration. We have the flexibility to work with you from definition, to review and implementation.