I return with an update. I had a reply to my stackoverflow question from user @MihaiChelaru. He saw what appears to be the exact same failure, at the exact same macOS upgrade.
In his research he found a solution: forcing a full reload of CTL with sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
. After doing that (and some other macOS stuff as described in the SO post) my CMake build was miraculously cured!
While my c++ project has definitely changed in the 20 days, it was still failing the same way when I tested it today before deleting CLT. But importantly (in my opinion) my installation of CMake is unchanged as is my project's build script (called CMakeLists.txt
). So:
- CMake build was working
- I installed macOS 14.7.2 and Xcode 16.2
- CMake build stopped working
- I deleted my /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools, etc.
- CMake build started working again
I am certainly not in charge of how Apple chooses to allocate its software maintenance resources. But it would be super simple to create a minimal test in an acceptance suite to build a CMake hello.c project. Or possibly, explicitly clearing a user's CLT folder before switching?
Having been in your shoes, I know these policy issues always seem simple from the outside. But as a long time Mac user, I felt duty-bound to make sure this information made it back to you.