Building Emacs from source doesn't generate a native application on macOS Catalina

Question

I've been trying to build Emacs 28 from source on my MacBook Pro running macOS 10.15.5. I managed to get the feature/native-comp branch working, but I found it to be too unstable, so I deleted Emacs and tried rebuilding off of the master branch.

Now when I build off of the master branch, I can't get the GUI'd Emacs to build. I've tried blowing away the source directory and rebuilding from scratch, but that didn't fix anything.

Here's how I build:

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --without-ns && make
$ make install

I worry I might have bungled deleting the old app. Any suggestions on what I might try next?

Answer 1

When using the flag --without-ns, that means do not build Emacs specifically for the MacOS platform. How about using --with-ns instead, or no flag at all? The build script should automatically build Emacs for MacOS when building on that platform -- i.e., when not using --with-ns or --without-ns. The package Emacs.app will be in the nextstep folder of the Emacs source code.

Here is an excerpt from the ./configure --help output:

Optional Packages:

  --without-PACKAGE       do not use PACKAGE (same as --with-PACKAGE=no)

  --with-ns               use Nextstep (macOS Cocoa or GNUstep) windowing
                          system. On by default on macOS.