Need some advice regarding patches for old AppKit compatibility

Jason Liu jasonliu at umich.edu
Thu Jun 4 04:50:07 UTC 2020


Looking through the link that Chris provided, it looks like the MacPorts
legacy support package might indeed be the perfect place to add my AppKit
compatibility layer file. One tiny question that I have is: In the readme,
where it says "GNU make is a hard build dependency", does that sentence
mean that the MacPorts legacy support package itself needs GNU make, or
does it mean that any portfile that uses the legacysupport PortGroup needs
to add GNU make as a build dependency?

Jason

-- 
Jason Liu


On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 5:34 PM Jason Liu <jasonliu at umich.edu> wrote:

> Great, I'll have a look at the stuff in that area. Thanks, Chris.
>
> Jason
>
> --
> Jason Liu
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 2:38 PM Christopher Jones <jonesc at hep.phy.cam.ac.uk>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Sounds like this *could* be a candidate for something to add to our
>> legacy support package. see
>>
>> https://github.com/macports/macports-legacy-support
>>
>> A port for this exists in MacPorts, and is applied as required to ports
>> that need the support layer using the legacysupport PortGroup.
>>
>> I think if we are to have a compatibility layer, as you describe below,
>> putting it in the same place as the above is the way to go, so please take
>> a look and submit MRs adding what you think is needed to it.
>>
>> Chris
>>
>> On 3 Jun 2020, at 7:01 pm, Jason Liu <jasonliu at umich.edu> wrote:
>>
>> In my course of packaging some new ports, I've run across a couple
>> instances of applications which are claimed by their devs to only be
>> compatible with "macOS 10.12 and above". However, I've discovered that in
>> reality, the only reason they're no longer compatible with older versions
>> of macOS is because the names of a lot of constants changed in AppKit
>> starting in 10.12. All of these constants appear to be related to either
>> the drawing of GUI Cocoa windows or UI events (e.g. mouse down, mouse
>> dragged, etc.).
>>
>> So far, I've encountered two pieces of software where this is happening:
>> Blender and MaterialX.
>>
>> A solution I found which some projects (e.g. Qemu) have implemented
>> basically replaces the new AppKit constants with the old AppKit ones using
>> *#define* directives if the OS version is below 10.12. I've created a
>> separate header file that gathers together a list of the constants I've
>> been able to find, which is modeled on information from this message:
>>
>> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2017-04/msg04330.html
>>
>> I'm doing my portfile development on a machine running 10.11, and have
>> verified that my patch seems to allow me to build these applications
>> without any noticeable issues (no runtime crashes, segfaults, etc.).
>>
>> So my question to everyone is: Should I just add my header file to the
>> files/ folder for whichever ports need it? Or is this something that
>> might benefit from me creating a project in GitHub? I'm guessing that there
>> could be other software packages which might benefit from such a
>> compatibility layer.
>>
>> --
>> Jason Liu
>>
>>
>>
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