MacPorts on Other Platforms

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Sep 20, 2009, at 07:13, Anders F Björklund wrote:

> But if there's any interest, I could post the failures somewhere.
> Mostly it's just about hardcoding .dylib or missing a "platform{}"

I try to put obviously Mac OS X-specific things in a "platform darwin"  
section. I've certainly seen ports that don't bother.

I'm sure if anyone were actually trying to use MacPorts on another OS  
and encountered problems, they would file tickets.

> PS. What _is_ the "platforms" keyword really good for, anyway ?
>    If it's not being checked, and doesn't allow version/arch ?


The purpose is probably to give somebody looking at the portfile or  
"port info" output an indication of the platforms the maintainer  
intends the port to work with.

It's kinda like the license keyword we have now. Nothing in base uses  
that either; it's just informative to the user.

We could write code in base to check the platform -- for example to  
check that if "platforms" is "macosx" that we are really running on  
Mac OS X and not PureDarwin. But since I doubt anybody is using  
MacPorts on anything other than Mac OS X, our effort might be better  
spent elsewhere.