Snow Leopard +universal necessity

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Sep 2, 2009, at 08:26, Jeremy Lavergne wrote:

>> I guess there are several ports that will not work 64-bit, we just  
>> haven't come across them yet. I imagine a lot of the bugs currently  
>> classified as Snow Leopard-related issues are in fact 64-bit- 
>> related. So far I see the following ports forcing themselves to 32- 
>> bit builds:
>>
>> bochs
>> synergy
>> wine
>> wine-crossover-games
>> wine-devel
>
> Alright, we should do that then.  In the future when these start  
> becoming 64-bit capable, are we going to switch back to non- 
> universal by default?  Will we simply maintain that universal should  
> be used?

I don't know. My guess is that some software will never be 64-bit  
capable. I don't think we should remove ports from the tree solely for  
that reason, so it is a situation a user might run into. When they do,  
it's pretty annoying for MacPorts to happily install all the  
dependencies 64-bit, and then fail with an unpredictable error when  
actually compiling the requested port 32-bit. Granted the user can now  
probably rebuild all ports with the universal variant with a single  
"upgrade --force" command, but a lot of the user's time has been wasted.

Wine 64-bit support is in progress:

http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine64

It sounds like there is a lot of work to do. What's not clear to me is  
whether 64-bit wine can be used to run 32-bit Windows programs. If  
not, then there would continue to be a reason for a user to want to  
build wine 32-bit.