Dependency on developer tools

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 23, 2009, at 15:00, Scott Haneda wrote:

> You just saddened me as I run multiple PPC servers :)

I understand, and I am on your side. I want to support older systems.  
But we appear to be in the minority.


> Do you have stats?

I have no stats. I am recalling the recent situation with glib2: as of  
MacPorts 1.8.0, the "-arch" flag is passed along to every port. But  
glib2's behavior was such that if any "-arch" flag appears -- even  
just one -- it assumes you're building universal. This is clearly a  
ludicrous assumption, but until now the developers apparently did not  
encounter a situation where it was not true. If you pass only a single  
"-arch" flag, as MacPorts now does when not building universal, this  
somehow had the effect of making glib2 assume it was on Intel, always,  
regardless of what arch you actually passed. glib2 would install  
successfully, but any port that needed glib2, like say gtk2, would  
fail to build, with a weird message. It took over a month and hundreds  
of lines of patches and scripts to fix glib2. Other ports may have  
similar as-yet-undiscovered issues.


> I would be willing to wager there is a disproportionate amount of  
> users that are on PPC using MacPorts.

I don't doubt that there are still Mac users with PowerPC Macs using  
MacPorts. But I am contending that the number of software developers  
and port maintainers with PowerPC Macs is decreasing, meaning  
developers and maintainers are more likely to introduce PowerPC-only  
bugs that go undetected.


> I will bring this up also on the off list thread about Web site  
> changes, as with a little plugging in of Analytics, or running the  
> logs, we can find out exactly what the breakdown is, based on  
> browser and OS.

Sure, web site analysis could be interesting.

I also once suggested that MacPorts should send stats about what got  
installed up to our server so we can tell what ports are popular, and  
also what kinds of systems people are running them on. But this was  
seen as "phoning home" and an invasion of privacy. It could be an opt- 
in feature, but I thought this would make it less useful.