Isn't Panther *already* not "officially" supported anymore?
http://www.macports.org says:
"""
We provide a single software tree that attempts to track the latest
release of every software title (port) we distribute, without
splitting them into “stable” Vs. “unstable” branches, targetting
mainly the current Mac OS X release (10.5, A.K.A Leopard) and the
immediately previous one (10.4, A.K.A. Tiger).
"""
To me, that implies that we try not to break older releases, but we
won't bend over backwards to support them either.
Add the HAVE_LCHOWN bits to configure.ac and let Panther users deal
with the issue. They have thus far.
--Jeremy
On Mar 2, 2009, at 00:34, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
Thanks for the correction - I have a hard time keeping the various
releases straight since they all seem to kind of blend into one
another for some reason. :-)
I don't think the question is "whether to exclude Panther" (though
at almost 6 years old, one wonders how long users might expect open
source projects to support it), but rather how much forward progress
should be held hostage to releases like Panther. I believe the
original question regarded the implementation of one of the GSoC
projects and what to do in the case of an old release, for which my
suggestion was simply "punt" given the low reward-to-effort ratio.
- Jordan
On Mar 2, 2009, at 12:15 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
On Mar 2, 2009, at 01:38, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
On Mar 1, 2009, at 10:53 PM, Bryan Blackburn wrote:
The problem is that 10.3 doesn't support lchown() which means
that currently
trunk fails to build there. Using a HAVE_LCHOWN test, we could
fall back to
using just chown() but then we're right back to the original
problem but
just for 10.3. Porting lchown() to 10.3 is not going to happen
unless we
start shipping a custom kernel for those machines.
You could also simply punt on the notion of link ownership for tiger
Panther, not Tiger.
(call chown() for non-links, do nothing for links) since I seem to
recall that they inherited their ownership information from their
containing directory on 10.3 anyway - links have been somewhat
less "real" in prior releases than they are today.
I found this page:
http://www.jacek-dom.net/software/psync/readme.txt
It says:
"Note on Panther symlinks attributes: In older versions of BSD (and
in OS X 10.2 and earlier) symbolic links did not have their own
attributes (ownership and permissions) - they inherited attributes
of objects they pointed to. In FreeBSD 5.1 (on which Panther is
based in large part) symbolic links have their own attributes.
However, Apple, while porting FreeBSD to Darwin, allowed symlinks
to have its own attributes, but disabled all code that allowed to
manipulate those attributes - the system calls that implement it
(lchmod, lchown and lutimes) are commented out in source code (you
can see for yourself: <http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.3/file_cmds-82/
>). They did not remove it from documentation - so man pages for
chmod, chown, chgrp and touch describe the new -h option that
allows to modify symlink attributes, but it does not work. I am
sure that they had a very good reason to do that :)."
I have not tested whether this information is still accurate. But
even if it is, I don't think this is any reason to kill all hopes
of running MacPorts 1.8.0 on Panther, especially since it would be
no different than any previous version of MacPorts in regard to
symlink ownership.
Also note that we have another feature in MacPorts already that
does not work on Panther: the -E option to reinplace. Rather than
cutting off Panther support entirely at that point, the solution
that was implemented simply makes the -E option unavailable in
reinplace on Panther. So any of the 67 ports that use that option
won't work on Panther, but others will. Some of those ports
probably don't even need to use the -E option; someone probably
just copied it from another port and didn't know what it was for.
In fact I would imagine any of them could be rewritten to not use
the -E option if necessary.
_______________________________________________
macports-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-dev
_______________________________________________
macports-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-dev
