os.major etc. on Linux

[Ryan Schmidt]

> On May 13, 2016, at 4:49 AM, René J.V. Bertin <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Friday May 13 2016 04:23:24 Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> I think we've established that os_arch should only be i386 or powerpc.
> 
> Side-ways related: do we have an idea (or can we have an estimate) how many PPC Macs are still in use but running Linux in order to have a more up-to-date OS? Supposing that is not an entirely insignificant number they *might* represent an actual justification for extending MacPorts support of the Linux platform.

I'm not giving that any thought. MacPorts is about installing software on OS X. MacPorts developers and maintainers do not have expertise about installing software on Linux. There are other package managers that can be used to install software on Linux.


>> The problem is that there is no code in MacPorts to set an appropriate default for build_arch on platforms other than Darwin. Until such code is added, you can set the correct build_arch in macports.conf.
> 
> Do we agree that this is a bug(let) that shouldn't be hard to fix,

If someone knows how to determine if a Linux machine is 64-bit or 32-bit, yes, that knowledge could be put into that file.

> and that it shouldn't be necessary to fix a default setting in macports.conf?

Right, if code were added to have an appropriate default for build_arch on Linux, then there would be no need for you to set an explicit value for build_arch in macports.conf on Linux.