Different dmgs for different felines

[Rainer Müller]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> Rainer, would you prefer for us to distribute 5 different disk images of
> MacPorts then -- Panther PowerPC, Tiger PowerPC, Tiger Intel, Leopard
> PowerPC, Leopard Intel?

A disk image with four architectures will be around four times bigger
than it needs to be... Why should anybody want to download a large file
if 3/4 are useless data and just occupy disk space?

> Apple wants developers to make universal binaries so that users don't
> need to care what kind of processor they have. Other Mac developers are
> making universal binaries. We should too. And we already do. We just
> have separate images for Panther, Tiger and Leopard right now. And I'd
> like to unify that as well so that we end up with a single downloadable
> for our software, like most other Mac developers already have.

So why does Apple not just provide a interface to strip uneeded
architectures right on installing? Instead, they copy useless data. I
don't understand this... At least one can do it himself and remove them
with ditto.

> We already had several cases where users downloaded the Leopard MacPorts
> disk image, installed it on Tiger, and of course it didn't work. So
> distributing a single disk image which works everywhere is simpler for
> users.

[Those stupid users should learn to read...]

But if you download an universal disk image; after the first selfupdate,
which you normally do after install to get a newer minor version, you
will end up with a single architecture - the one of your system. Why
should disk images distribute a different version than selfupdate?

I don't want to debate over support universal building for ports,
somebody might need it. And I don't want to say that universal in
general is bad.

Rainer