Ryan Schmidt <ryandes...@...> writes: > I'm getting really burned out on universal. ... > > The new muniversal portgroup aims to solve this but has other severe > problems, in that the configure phase runs once for each > architecture, and some configure scripts are written wrong so they > try to run a program at configure time to learn things about the > build environment, which is not appropriate when cross-compiling. So > the configure script exits saying it cannot run a program when cross- > compiling, and the maintainer has to research what those values are > supposed to be for each architecture, possibly getting them wrong. > Many programs simply cannot be cross-compiled so then the list of > supported architectures is reduced, and it's a different list of > supported architectures depending on the computer doing the build. > > What if we set aside what we have now for universal variants and > spent some energy on finally doing binary builds? Finish the script > that builds a port in a clean MacPorts tree in a chroot. Make it > package that up and send it to a download server. Modify MacPorts > base to look for, download and install those binaries first. Make > those binaries integrate properly with the registry. Begin by having > the build server only build the default variant of a port, but later > it can be expanded to build more combinations of variants. We can > work out a system later that allows more variant combinations of an > old port to be built without impacting the building of newly-updated > ports. Since the server will have multiple cores we can run multiple > ports' builds simultaneously, in multiple chroots.
I am all for binary builds, but I would suggest that work on universal variants continue (personally I find them very useful). Universal, however, should be limited to 32/64-bit universal as soon as possible. Having changes several ports over the muniversal PortGroup, the biggest obstacle is the cross-compiling (see http://trac.macports.org/attachment/ticket/17042/glib2-Portfile.diff) for the reasons noted above. I can not image that MacPorts ppc/i386 universal builds are in widespread use. -Marcus _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-dev
