On Mar 20, 2018, at 15:32, Andreas Falkenhahn wrote: > Where does this difference come from? On my 10.5 G5 PowerMac it really was > just a few minutes and now it's taking hours. Yes, the G5 is faster but > certainly not that much. To me it looked as if on 10.5 binaries were > downloaded and installed whereas on 10.4 everything is built from scratch. > Is that right?
Yes. We have never offered binaries for Mac OS X Tiger v10.4 or earlier. The ability for MacPorts to use binaries was added in version 2.0.0, released in 2011, at which point Tiger and Leopard had already been superseded by Snow Leopard for two years. We initially offered binaries for Snow Leopard x86_64, and added binaries for subsequent versions of macOS as they were released. When we left macOS forge at the end of 2016 and set up our own infrastructure and redesigned our build system, we also began building binaries for Snow Leopard i386 and Leopard ppc. We could purchase a second Power Mac G5 and start building binaries for Tiger ppc. There is not a great deal of interest in Tiger anymore, but I understand that the computers that are still running Tiger are slow and are thus the ones that might most benefit from the existence of binaries.
