Warnings when running meld on Mac OS X Sierra

Question

I've installed homebrew on my machine. Using brew I've installed meld. When I run it with git I get the following error:

Couldn't bind the translation domain. Some translations won't work.
'module' object has no attribute 'bindtextdomain'
2016-10-20 10:14:08.422 Python[22212:158273] *** WARNING: Method userSpaceScaleFactor in class NSView is deprecated on 10.7 and later. It should not be used in new applications. Use convertRectToBacking: instead.

(meld:22212): Gdk-WARNING **: GdkQuartzDisplay does not implement the monitor vfuncs

I don't understand how exactly brew works. In fact I never dug into its code, used it only to (un)install the software.

Did some online searches but there doesn't seem to be a solution to this. Has anyone figured it out?

Answer 1

Homebrew is simply a a package manager for MacOS. Unlike Linux, Mac doesn't always have all the external libraries you may need for things like wget, pip, etc out of the box. Homebrew tries to bridge this gap.

As for troubleshooting your issue, following Homebrew's troubleshooting steps helped me... You are probably just stuck in dependency hell, since Homebrew integrates alot of its libraries with Xcode (for me it was needing to update Xcode to latest): https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Troubleshooting.md#troubleshooting

It's really important to keep thing up-to-date with brew update and then running brew doctor and brew prune resolved alot of issues for me as well.

If all else fails, homebrew seemed to have moved the meld formulae from homebrew/core to caskroom/cask. So I recall having to run the following command after running brew doctor and updating Xcode:

$ brew uninstall meld
$ brew install meld
Error: No available formula with the name "meld"
It was migrated from homebrew/core to caskroom/cask.
You can access it again by running:
brew tap caskroom/cask
$ brew tap caskroom/cask
$ brew cask install meld
==> Downloading https://github.com/yousseb/meld/releases/download/osx-9/meldmerge.dmg
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Verifying checksum for Cask meld
==> Moving App 'Meld.app' to '/Applications/Meld.app'.
==> Linking Binary 'Meld' to '/usr/local/bin/meld'.
🍺  meld was successfully installed!