On May 15, 2008, at 3:52 PM, Erwan David wrote: > I've got an Intel Imac and a G4 powerbook. Is it possible to build > the > ports for the powerbook on the more powerful Imac ?
Oof. This would probably fall under the "very advanced" category of usage. You can build ports with the +universal variant. As you might guess, this will build universal binaries of the ports, which can then be used on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. (Without the +universal variant, MacPorts builds ports that work on whatever the local architecture is.) To get these universal binaries from the Intel Mac to the PowerPC Mac, I wouldn't do it any other way than transferring your Intel Mac's *entire* MacPorts installation to the PowerPC Mac. That is, take all of /opt/local on the Intel Mac and copy it to the PowerPC Mac via rsync or as a tarball. (You could exclude the /opt/local/var/ macports/distfiles directory to save space on the PowerPC Mac if desired.) By way of counterexample, I would *not* attempt to build a port universal on the Intel Mac and then copy just that port's files to the PowerPC Mac. For one thing the port may have dependencies on other ports. For another, MacPorts on the PowerPC Mac wouldn't know that you had copied these items, "port installed" on the PowerPC Mac wouldn't show it as installed, etc. You can add +universal to your /opt/local/etc/macports/variants.conf on your Intel Mac to ask it to build all ports you install with that variant, without you having to remember to type it at every install command. However, some ports have not yet been tested as universal binaries and may not build properly. Or they may build but then not work on the foreign architecture. For some ports the universal variant has been expressly disabled, either because no way has been found to make it possible, or because nobody has yet tried to make it possible. Both the Intel and the PowerPC Mac must have the same major version of Mac OS X installed, preferably the same version entirely, and should have the same version of Xcode too. For example both must be running Tiger with Xcode 2.5, or both must be running Leopard with Xcode 3.0. Don't attempt this if they're running different major versions. MacPorts itself (i.e. the port command) is universal when installed from the MacPorts installation disk image. I'm not confident, however, that it remains universal after you've gone through a selfupdate. This would be a problem if you had done a selfupdate on the Intel Mac (and that selfupdate resulted in MacPorts base being rebuilt) and you still wanted to use the port command on the PowerPC Mac after you had copied the Intel Mac's MacPorts installation to it. _______________________________________________ macports-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-users
