variant or platform

[Anders F Björklund]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> And you posited that "x86" worked on some platforms, while I know that 
> "i386" is correct for Intel Macs. In terms of what happens if you 
> write a platform selector in MacPorts, I don't think i386 is a subset 
> of x86 at all; if I were to draw a Venn diagram, I don't think the two 
> circles would intersect. uname either returns i386 (like on Intel 
> Macs) or it returns x86 (on some other Intel computers). I think my 
> point was just that any occurrences of "platform x86" or "variant x86" 
> should *not* be changed to "platform i386" because the x86 selectors 
> seem to have been used in the past to target non-Macs, which would 
> make this software start to fail on Intel Macs.

Seems like all the current ports with "x86" or "intel" as the arch are
either wrong or typos, though... "darwin x86" should be "darwin i386",
and the one (1) port with "darwin intel" is just plain wrong IMHO.

They should most likely be *standardized* to be "powerpc" or "i386",
even though the aliases "ppc" and "x86" are theoretically valid too
(for example Darwin 6-7 was i386, Darwin 8-9 are i686, both: "x86")

It's easy to tweak port.tcl to return "i386" for any "x86" or "i686"
machines from tcl_platform, just as it is currently returns "powerpc"
for the hopelessly silly `uname -m` return value of "Power Macintosh"...

The suggested "port platform" info command could help people determine
what values to put into their platform variants, but for the current
common target it's probably enough to make a list of available ones ?

--anders