pkg and mpkg

Michael Crawford mdcrawford at gmail.com
Sun Feb 7 23:09:00 PST 2010


On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org> wrote:
> Portfiles are Turing complete, so yes, you can in principle install
> however you like. It seems strange that the software would be able to
> build against the 10.4 SDK but not actually on < 10.6 though.

One can build software that uses 10.6 features if they are present,
but is still compatible with 10.4 and 10.5 provided one doesn't try to
use features that they didn't support.

The way this works is that the dynamic linker will set some of the
system framework function pointers to NULL if they aren't supported by
the framework.  So it is up to the developer to check the function
pointers before actually using them.

I don't know how it would be handled with MacPorts, but with Xcode
projects one can specify different major releases for the SDK and for
the deployment target.

Mike
-- 
Michael David Crawford
mdcrawford at gmail dot com

   GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks
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