MacPorts recorded graphviz-oldgui was installed with arch i386 but it actually installed arch ppc

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 12, 2010, at 13:54, Joshua Root wrote:
> On 2010-6-13 04:34 , Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> graphviz-oldgui installs a pre-compiled binary; source is not available. The binary is ppc-only so in r68725 I added "supported_archs ppc". I was surprised then to see that on my Snow Leopard Mac MacPorts recorded in the registry that this port was installed with the arch i386:
>> 
>> $ port -v installed graphviz-oldgui
>> The following ports are currently installed:
>>  graphviz-oldgui @16_0 (active) platform='darwin 10' archs='i386'
>> 
>> I had expected to see "archs='ppc'" not "archs='i386'".
>> 
>> I filed this as #25219 but Joshua closed it as invalid, saying I should write "configure.build_arch ppc".
>> 
>> I don't understand why the value MacPorts automatically set configure.build_arch to was not one of the archs supported by the port nor why this is not considered a bug.
> 
> If the user has configured i386 in macports.conf, why should they get
> ppc? You are making unfounded assumptions about the value of
> configure.build_arch; try printing it. If there's a bug, it's that we
> don't error out when the chosen build arch is unsupported.

The user has not configured i386 in macports.conf; he has configured x86_64. But neither x86_64 nor i386 are available for this port; only ppc is, as indicated in supported_archs.

My understanding was that the supported_archs option was supposed to make unnecessary manual setting of configure.build_arch. For example, to force a 32-bit build we used to write:

if {$build_arch == "x86_64"} {
    configure.build_arch i386
} elseif {$build_arch == "ppc64"} {
    configure.build_arch ppc
}

And now we can replace that with:

supported_archs ppc i386

MacPorts knows about acceptable fallback architectures in case the one the user requested in macports.conf is not available. For example it correctly knows that i386 is a fallback for x86_64 and that ppc is a fallback for ppc64. I would say it just needs to be taught that ppc is a fallback for i386 and then everything's happy, no?