info

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Fri, 27 Nov 2020 at 16:27, Giovanni Cantele wrote:
>
> Dear All,.
>
> I’m searching the web but I cannot find any response to the following question:
>
> is there any ongoing project for porting the whole macports staff on the new Apple silicon architecture?

There is no "special ongoing project". There are volunteer owners of
Apple silicon trying to fix the bugs they encounter.
MacPorts itself should work, lots of ports work, some complex software
requires non-trivial patches from upstream.

> What happens to those who extensively make use of macports and have bought the recent released MacBook Pro running on the new processors?

You should be able to install MacPorts and many ports. But you should
not be surprised if you hit some that will refuse to build and you may
need to wait for upstream to fix the issue (or try to fix it yourself
and submit a patch or find someone else capable of fixing it ...).

You brought up an interesting point though, we should probably publish
some official statement about arm support on our main website.

On Fri, 4 Dec 2020 at 16:19, Alejandro Imass wrote:
>
> What you are saying suggests that nothing major has changed except the LLVM target to arm64, is this correct?

Disclaimer: I don't have any experience with an arm-based mac.

As far as MacPorts is concerned, I would say that indeed "almost
nothing major" has changed in principle (other than the processor,
which is ... well, a really major change).

A lot of relatively simple, well-written software with a well-written
build system should often work out of the box.

But a lot of software may either have some hard-coded assumptions in
either their build system or the source, it may require some
intel-specific intrinsics, or it may depend on some complex
third-party library that doesn't compile. Apple also likes to increase
security standards each year which may break many ports in various
ways.

If you have your favourite port, you can quickly check the build
results on, say,
    https://ports.macports.org/port/wget/stats
and check for either green port status or some reported installations
on arm64, check for open tickets etc. Keep in mind that many port
builds haven't been attempted yet.

(I also see that some builds like wget were successful, but missing on
the list, while some like youtube-dl are redirected to the x86_64
builder and also don't end up on that list.)

Mojca