On Thu, 2006-07-27 at 15:21 -0700, Ben Byer wrote: > I'd like to be able to build OpenMPI "fat" -- for multiple > architectures in one pass, so I can create a universal binary for > OSX. I see that it was mentioned last year, at http://www.open- > mpi.org/community/lists/users/2005/06/0087.php as something that was > "a ways off". > > Has any progress been made on that front, or do you still plan to > support this?
We currently can't build a universal binary in "one pass". We actually had a long discussion with some Apple engineers about the issue and what it came down to was that supporting a "one pass" build of Open MPI as a universal binary would take lots of development effort in making Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool smarter. We don't have the resources to do that work on the autotools and it doesn't sound like there is enough demand on the autotools authors for them to do the work, so it's unlikely we'll progress on that front for some time. We do provide a script in contrib/dist/macosx/ that will take a tarball and build a universal binary .pkg file. It ends up running the configure / compile sequence three times (PPC, PPC64, and x86), but it works quite well. Mostly because it works so well, it is very difficult to make further work on our build system to support a "one pass" build of a Universal Binary a high priority. Brian
