MacPorts on Other Platforms

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Sep 21, 2009, at 01:10, Anders F Björklund wrote:

> Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> "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...

We can easily change that of course. I obviously didn't realize there  
was any difference at all between "make" and "make -j1". I don't see  
how "make -j1" could be thought to be a parallel build mode, since it  
will run only 1 job at a time, hence no jobs in parallel...


> 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.

But MacPorts is documented as using GNU make by default. That's  
build.type. MacPorts should be using GNU make by default on all  
platforms unless the port sets build.type to bsd. Is this not the case?


> Patch has same problems,
> with /usr/bin/patch versus gpatch (either system or through port).

I imagine so; I see you made gpatch available in base; thanks.


> 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.

Yeah. I guess all we can do is fix things when problems are reported.