invisible universal variant and merger_must_run_binaries

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 3, 2021, at 01:29, Ken Cunningham wrote:

> On Feb 2, 2021, at 11:22 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> I consider the buildbot a "nice to have". It makes life easier by precompiling things but it is not essential. When something is not available precompiled, MacPorts builds from source. If something doesn't build correctly from source, let's fix that.
> 
> OK — for users out there, then, we should begin to make it clear that building +universal on a BigSur Intel machine is not going to work out for a number of ports, and although they might find some ports can build universal on BigSur Intel, for comprehensive +universal support, they should expect to use BigSur arm64.
> 
> That is fine with me — IMHO nobody should really be putting anything out that hasn’t been actually tried on an actual BigSur arm64 machine anyway.
> 
> But should be clear to people what to expect.

I'm not aware of this "number of ports". The number of ports that both use the muniversal portgroup and need to run something they built should hopefully be small. For each one, I recommend trying to fix it as I outlined previously.

I wouldn't embark on a campaign of seeding users with the idea that advertised MacPorts features don't work. Instead, as always, I would recommend that users file bug reports when they find anything that doesn't work, and then we can fix those issues. For the situation you're talking about, that could include fixing or (conditionally?) disabling the universal variant.