I had a perfectly running development environment under Mavericks 10.9.1 . I’m not, by nature, someone who would prefer to use a Mac, but sometimes we have to take what we’re given, and, at least, it’s Unix-based.

I was surviving without having to install Xcode, until recently when I had to investigate Apple’s illegally-modified “pngcrush” utility. I required Xcode in order to get the iPhone optimizations. Otherwise, I just got the standard version of the open-source utility. So, I installed it.

Yesterday, I had to install/build the Python “cryptography” module, which requires a C build-environment. Now, I had some cc/gcc discrepancies, and one unsupported command-line argument. Obviously, it’s Xcode. So, I uninstalled it. I innocently also installed the 10.9.1->10.9.2 Mavericks update at the same time.

Catastrophe. Now, the same stuff is broken, and I get warnings every single time I invoke Brew:

Warning: No developer tools installed.
You should install the Command Line Tools.
Run `xcode-select --install` to install them.

When I run xcode-select, I get a dialog that says the command-line tools are required, one button for installing them, and another for the full Xcode install. When I click to install the tools, I got the EULA and then a progress-bar that said “Finding Software”, only to give me a message:

Can't install the software because it is not currently available from the Software Update server.

I had to physically go and download the dmg package: http://developer.apple.com/downloads

However, when I dragged the pkg file into Applications and ran it, I inevitably ran into the following message, every time:

The installation failed.

The Installer can't locate the data it needs to install the software. Check your install media or Internet connection and try again, or contact the software manufacturer for assistance.

It turns out that it expected to be run directly from the dmg container. It looks like everything is working now (with only the command-line tools, and not requiring the whole Xcode install).

Though I’m still investigating the build errors I now having, the emphasis of this post is how to remedy the Xcode/tools errors that I was seeing.