Dependency on developer tools

[Anders F Björklund]

Scott Haneda wrote:

> On Oct 23, 2009, at 1:11 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> 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 do not know too much about this, but I do know that glib2 is  
> probably a very widely used C lib, is that not correct?  How in the  
> heck was this not noticed ages ago?  glib2 probably is in the top  
> 10% of installed dependencies I would imagine.

There are a lot of ports failing with the new mandatory -arch flag  
(from MacPorts 1.8). Not all of them have been upgraded or rebuilt  
yet, so I don't think we've seen all the failures this caused yet.

Similar issues occur with the new parallel build (make -j) default.  
Before both of these settings were optional, so didn't affect as many  
ports (and thus users) as now when they are the default.

--anders