variant or platform

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jul 15, 2007, at 15:21, Anders F Björklund wrote:

> 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",

I still say that this needs to be examined and evaluated individually  
for each port. If nobody's complaining about these ports, then maybe  
whatever's being done in the darwin x86 platform selector isn't  
necessary for Intel Macs at all, and might in fact be harmful.

For example, mpfr has a section "platform darwin x86", but it also  
has an identical section "platform darwin i386", so the port  
maintainer, Vincent, should be asked why this is duplicated. I'm  
Cc'ing him on this email.

And xgalaga has a section "platform darwin x86" which should clearly  
be "platform darwin i386", and I've changed that now, but the port  
doesn't build on Intel Macs anyway because it uses (and seems maybe  
to require) gcc 3.3.

> and the one (1) port with "darwin intel" is just plain wrong IMHO.

Ah -- "darwin intel" -- that's why I didn't find it before. Got it  
now: it's libdnsres. I'm Cc'ing the maintainer, Mark, since he should  
have a say in this, but I agree, this should be "platform darwin  
i386". I think he should also remove the unnecessary CFLAGS and  
LDFLAGS definitions.

> 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")

I don't know what you mean by all of this. I'm on darwin 8 now, and  
uname returns i386, and "platform x86" sections definitely do not get  
executed by MacPorts on an Intel Mac currently. If you're suggesting  
that MacPorts base could be changed so that x86 would also work on  
Intel Macs, then I again reiterate that I believe x86 is being used  
in several ports right now in an attempt to target non-Macs. If such  
a change were made to base, those ports would start failing on Intel  
Macs.

> 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"...

It might have been clearer if we had tweaked "i386", "i686", and  
"x86" to be just "intel", but I'm not sure if we want to go to all  
the trouble to do that now.

> 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 ?

I'm not sure what you mean here? What suggested "port platform" info  
command?