Dear Fink developers, I am pleased to announce that fink can now run in exclusive 64bit mode on intel hardware, using the new "x86_64" architecture available for the 10.5 distribution (and later). As of fink-0.29.5, a permanent architecture for fink must be selected when fink is initially installed, i.e., at bootstrap time. If fink is being installed on intel hardware which is capable of running in 64bit mode, the user is presented with a choice of the default mode (mostly 32bit), or the 64bit mode. These correspond to the architectures "i386" and "x86_64". (In all other cases, there is no choice to be made, and a default architecture is selected for the user automatically.)
Accompanying this is a slight change in the behavior of the %m percent substitution in .info files. This substitution still denotes "machine architecture", but it's the one which the user has chosen, not always tied to the "uname" output as before. The possible values for Architecture (as returned by %m) are powerpc, i386, and x86_64. It is possible to have two separate fink installations on the same (intel) machine, one for each architecture, with one stored in /sw and the other stored elsewhere (I am using /sw64 myself). However, there are some pitfalls: you need to make sure that whatever shell is launching a fink command has had the appropriate /sw/bin/init.(c)sh or /sw64/bin/init.(c)sh applied first -- otherwise there can be confusion between the two fink's which can lead to failure. A small handful of us have been working with the x86_64 architecture for a while, so we know that many packages work. You can look through the .info and .patch files to see how we've addressed some of the issues that arise. In some cases, we've been able to use %m to handle everything within a single .info file, while in other cases, we've used "Architecture: x86_64" in a file named foo-x86_64.info . We're advertising this to developers now, rather than users, to give all of us a chance to improve fink on this architecture before making a broader announcement. Thanks, as always, for your help, and happy finking! -- Dave ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The NEW KODAK i700 Series Scanners deliver under ANY circumstances! Your production scanning environment may not be a perfect world - but thanks to Kodak, there's a perfect scanner to get the job done! With the NEW KODAK i700 Series Scanner you'll get full speed at 300 dpi even with all image processing features enabled. http://p.sf.net/sfu/kodak-com _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net http://news.gmane.org/gmane.os.apple.fink.devel
