On Dec 5, 2009, at 6:24 PM, Jason King wrote: > Greg mentioned that MacPorts installs a full duplicate structure > (basically it installs a full GNU system) - this is true, but there > is a very good reason. The base OSX packages/libs are Universal > builds whereas MacPorts will (correctly in my opinion) builds for > your architecture only. If it then tried to link the (eg.) Intel- > only binaries against Universal libs then it would fail miserably.
Hadn't heard/thought of the dedicated architecture builds -- that's a reasonable advantage I can see some folks finding attractive. I'll be sure to mention that in the future. With Snow Leopard, most of that Universal bulk goes away doesn't it? I suppose there could be 32/64 bit bulk, but the PPC baggage is gone. I mostly hear of the purpose being so that it's very easy to get rid of the whole thing -- find /opt and delete. That does make it a handy way to try things without dirtying the default OS locations, and I have done that. If I want to play with a package and don't want to pepper my base OS with it, I'll do a macports install, and then if it is worth keeping, I'll nuke /opt and install by building. > I'd like to add that if people are building binaries by hand then > they are either (a) building arch-specific binaries and therefore > running the risk of linking with Universal libs or (b) building > Universal binaries and suffering the performance and size penalties > involved there. I think every time I've done this, I've noticed arch-specific options, but haven't seen any fallout from that (though I can't say I've built dozens of things, or done it with non-very-main-stream stuff, so my experience may be that thin layer of simple cases). -- greg -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
