Finding the machine CPU arch

[Vincent Habchi]

Rainer,

> Sorry, it's not that I want to put a lot of work on your stack, so
> please don't take this as offense. I am just making proposals on how

Don’t worry, I was not even thinking about that. But it is already complex, because we have a lot of CPU to take into account (sse3/ssse3/sse4.1/sse4.2/avx and fma is coming with Haswell processors later this spring)
> this could be solved such that we do not loose the ability to distribute
> binary archives.

What I don’t understand is how the addition of variants would save the binary archives, especially if we follow your suggestion that the default variants should match the host CPU: in that case, we would end up with a buildbot building a version with the most appropriate variants for itself, and just a very few percentage of Mac owners, those happening to possess exactly the same CPU, would benefit from binaries…

Atlas configuration *is* tedious. The portfile is 654 lines long.

> I appreciate the contributions by all port maintainers. If you say that
> this would cost more time than you are able to offer and want to invest
> into MacPorts, that's totally fine and it's okay if this is dropped.
> Please just do it your way as MacPorts would not be the same without the
> various contributions from users from all fields!

Don’t worry once again. Everybody here is very open minded. Every suggestion should be weighted and debated.

> The version using variant is reproducible as everyone would still use
> the same flags and gets the same result. These binaries could be shared
> between machines with the canonical identifier of
> name/version/revision/variants attached. This is the key concept of our
> pre-compiled archives.

Yes, but the buildbot does not build a version for every possible variant, does it?

Cheers and sorry for the late answer. My MacBook broke yesterday  (actually only the trackpad, but it was failing with an odd symptom: the machine would start up or shut down randomly after a few seconds of boot) – I removed the trackpad, but then the keyboard ceased to function: both seems to be linked. Fortunately, I own a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and I have ordered replacement part.

Vincent