On Dec 28, 2007, at 10:11, Rainer Müller wrote:
Ryan Schmidt wrote:
Why is it again that we need separate dmgs for separate OS
releases at
all? Why don't we just have a single universal dmg, with the PowerPC
part built with the 10.3.9 SDK and the Intel part built with the
10.4u
SDK, and everyone's happy? Isn't that the whole point of universal
binaries and those SDKs?
Frankly, that's how I'd like ports built too, when the +universal
binary
is selected. But that can be a separate topic for another day.
As +universal is not the default (a very good thing IMHO), why
should we
distribute the MacPorts base system as universal?
I don't like these universal stuff at all, for most people it is
occupying disk space for no actual use. Most people will use one
MacPorts installation on one system - which is obviously one
architecture.
Rainer, would you prefer for us to distribute 5 different disk images
of MacPorts then -- Panther PowerPC, Tiger PowerPC, Tiger Intel,
Leopard PowerPC, Leopard Intel?
Apple wants developers to make universal binaries so that users don't
need to care what kind of processor they have. Other Mac developers
are making universal binaries. We should too. And we already do. We
just have separate images for Panther, Tiger and Leopard right now.
And I'd like to unify that as well so that we end up with a single
downloadable for our software, like most other Mac developers already
have.
We already had several cases where users downloaded the Leopard
MacPorts disk image, installed it on Tiger, and of course it didn't
work. So distributing a single disk image which works everywhere is
simpler for users.
As for +universal variants in ports, most users won't need to select
this variant themselves, but once we get to distributing compiled
binaries of ports, which is a long-term goal, I think we would want
to distribute universal binaries so that we only have to manage a
single collection of binaries, and not multiple collections, one for
each architecture. Anyway we don't really need to debate anymore
*whether* we should have universal support. We already do, and I see
no reason why it should be removed; rather, I see reasons why it
should be kept and improved.
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