My initial thought is that the issue might be a library linking problem, because I see ld: warning: dylib (/usr/local/ff-petsc/r/lib/libparpack.dylib) was built for newer macOS version (14.1) than being linked (14.0) when I make petsc-slepc. So I tried including the argument cflags=-mmacosx-version-min=14.0 (based on what I saw on other online forums) in the configuration, but that doesn’t work. I’ve attached my config.log for reference.
I solved the issue I had installing my FF on Mac OS Sonoma (14.1), and thought it good to share here for anyone who might have a similar issue (and perhaps something for the FF dev team to look into).
As previously mentioned, I had multiple library linking warnings when trying to ‘make’ FF, then failure. Upon further investigation, the root of the issue seems to be the new Xcode 15 linker (Xcode 15 Release Notes | Apple Developer Documentation). I modified the FF Makefile to set the linker to the classic linker (LDFLAGS = -ld_classic) instead of the new default Xcode linker. Apparently you can also use the flag -ld64 to request the classic linker.
The FF build was successful and passed the make checks after this adjustment. The linker still prints many warnings but they are harmless. This modification might be important because older versions of Xcode cannot run on macOS Sonoma, so you don’t have much of a choice if your computer is new.
You need to use this flag (LDFLAGS=-Wl,-ld_classic) since Xcode 15. It was supposed to be fixed by Apple in version 15.1, but it still isn’t. Maybe it will be OK with Xcode 15.2 (which beta was released this December).