MacPorts on Other Platforms

[Anders F Björklund]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:

>> Some of the errors are a bit trickier, like for instance expecting
>> /usr/bin/patch to be GNU patch or assuming that "make -j1" works.
>
> "make -j1" doesn't work on other platforms?

Not always, since -j1 is also a parallel build mode so it fails
on some makes much the same way as -j2 does. "make" is safer...

It's not so much about other OS platforms as it is about different
/usr/bin/make, as you can test on Mac OS X by pointing the symlink
at bsdmake instead of the default gnumake. Patch has same problems,
with /usr/bin/patch versus gpatch (either system or through port).


MacPorts unfortunately has a lot of unspecified dependencies like
that, whether it is on /usr/bin/make or /usr/bin/patch or if it is
/usr/bin/javac or /usr/sbin/mtree - all of them beyond MP's control.
We've documented a few of them, but there are many more implicit.

This makes it less portable, if it requires "Mac OS X" and "Xcode"
instead of explicit dependencies like Tcl or GCC... That's all.

--anders