On Sep 3, 2010, at 11:59 AM, Peter Bigot wrote: > We could also use a downstream packager for OSX, so people won't have to > fight with the build process. (Ubuntu and Windows, too; I think Rob > Spanton's doing Fedora/RedHat, though we haven't coordinated the release > processes yet: that should be done with the return to mspgcc.)
Maybe a good way to provide MSPGCC4 (and related stuff) to the Mac users would be to feed releases into one of the existing open source porting and distribution channels for the Mac, such as Fink or MacPorts. I previously used Fink (which provides for both source and binary distribution), but I presently use MacPorts (which I think just distributes source) be because it seems to stay more up-to-date. While a new Mac user of MSPGCC4 would still need to build a huge pile of software if it was distributed via MacPorts, installation would be reduced to installing the base MacPorts installer package and then typing "sudo port install mspgcc4" (or something like that). The difficult task of getting the all of the necessary tools and pre-requisites in place prior to building MSPGCC4 would then be mostly automated, and it would fall upon the downstream packager person to submit new releases into MacPorts and do whatever patching, hacking, pre-requisite definition, etc. that's necessary to make things painless for the end users. In case you're not already familiar with MacPorts, you can take a quick peek here to get an idea of what it's about: http://www.macports.org/ The Mac is just different enough from the mainstream open source build platforms (i.e., various Linuxes) that installing stuff through MacPorts is often much easier than trying to port Linux-centric source distributions. Even when I choose to build something from the original source distribution instead of an available MacPort package (i.e., to get bleeding-edge code releases that haven't been ported yet), I try to get as much of my build environment and pre-requisite libraries as possible through MacPorts. I might be willing to take on the task of feeding MSPGCC4 stuff into MacPorts at some point, but I'm still wallowing in build issues and learning-curve stuff too much to commit to that just yet. -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X <[email protected]> Web page: http://www.nf6x.net/ GnuPG public key available from my web page.
