Dependency on developer tools

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 23, 2009, at 14:49, Lee Azzarello wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> On Oct 23, 2009, at 14:32, Michael Crawford wrote:
>>
>>> Apple's versions of the GNU toolchain are open source, and available
>>> from http://opensource.apple.com/

FYI, we have ports for Apple's gcc versions, if you really want to  
build them yourself (apple-gcc33, apple-gcc40, apple-gcc42).

>>> Suppose one were to build just enough of a toolchain to be able to
>>> build a MacPort, and provided just that as a binary download, that
>>> would get installed if Xcode wasn't installed.
>>
>> I don't see the benefit. We have always required Xcode be  
>> installed. Let's continue to do so, and alert the user about this  
>> requirement in the installer if necessary.
>
> That would definitely help new users. I do think it would be pretty  
> cool to not require any Xcode stuff as a feature. Personally, I  
> don't care about making OS X applications, I just want to be able to  
> install the same stuff I use on Linux on OS X.

We don't have the manpower at this point to adequately support all the  
variations we already claim to support: most port maintainers have  
only one Mac, running either Snow Leopard or Leopard. Tiger users are  
technically unsupported, and this situation gets worse as fewer and  
fewer people test anything on Tiger anymore and port updates  
unintentionally break Tiger. PowerPC users are technically supported,  
but as more and more maintainers and developers use Intel Macs, more  
and more PowerPC bugs are slipping in unnoticed. The point is we don't  
want to introduce yet another variable into the testing matrix. We  
want users to build the same way maintainers tested. That means Xcode.