On Dec 5, 2009, at 7:10 PM, Greg Willits wrote: > 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 hadn't thought about that. Checking some packages that I know how to check easily, like Perl and vim, suggests that some are Intel only now and some still have the PPC flags (no idea why). /usr/bin/perl -V flags show "-arch ppc" whereas /usr/bin/vim -V is Intel only. This still sounds like it will be a bit hit-and-miss - especially considering that linking against OSX Perl has definitely been one area where I've seen problems - which is unfortunate. Let me add that all my experience with linking problems has been on Leopard, by the time Snow Leopard came around I was well and truly invested in MacPorts. > 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. Yeah, it's certainly safer for the, sometimes inexperienced, Mac user base. >> 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). Right, so it will often not cause a problem - and I'm not sure why it works or fails when it does, but I've seen these issues when building things like new versions of mysql (against the OSX ruby or Perl), linking vim against OSX Perl or Ruby would trip over too, and big packages like ImageMagick. Basically lots of the good stuff that I'm always playing with :) FWIW, I've also seen it work reliably against certain packages. I built Passenger without a problem against the OSX Apache. But then recently I tried to build PHP and it failed to build against OSX Apache (again, on Leopard), so I've switched over recently to using the MacPorts Apache. Anyway, thanks for your response. I'm keen now to re-test a bunch of things on Snow Leopard. Cheers, Jason -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
