Building on Intel, running on G4

[Alakazam]

Hello,

I have copied this very interesting email to the HowTo section of the  
macports' wiki :

> http://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/buildUniversal

The question of MacPorts still being universal after a selfupdate is  
indicated as being open.

Regards,

-- 
Alakazam <alakazam at melix.net>

On 17 mai 08, at 08:01, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

>
> On May 15, 2008, at 3:52 PM, Erwan David wrote:
>
>> 	I've got an Intel Imac and a G4 powerbook. Is it possible to build
>> the
>> ports for the powerbook on the more powerful Imac ?
>
>
> Oof. This would probably fall under the "very advanced" category of
> usage.
>
> You can build ports with the +universal variant. As you might guess,
> this will build universal binaries of the ports, which can then be
> used on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. (Without the +universal variant,
> MacPorts builds ports that work on whatever the local architecture  
> is.)
>
> To get these universal binaries from the Intel Mac to the PowerPC
> Mac, I wouldn't do it any other way than transferring your Intel
> Mac's *entire* MacPorts installation to the PowerPC Mac. That is,
> take all of /opt/local on the Intel Mac and copy it to the PowerPC
> Mac via rsync or as a tarball. (You could exclude the /opt/local/var/
> macports/distfiles directory to save space on the PowerPC Mac if
> desired.) By way of counterexample, I would *not* attempt to build a
> port universal on the Intel Mac and then copy just that port's files
> to the PowerPC Mac. For one thing the port may have dependencies on
> other ports. For another, MacPorts on the PowerPC Mac wouldn't know
> that you had copied these items, "port installed" on the PowerPC Mac
> wouldn't show it as installed, etc.
>
> You can add +universal to your /opt/local/etc/macports/variants.conf
> on your Intel Mac to ask it to build all ports you install with that
> variant, without you having to remember to type it at every install
> command. However, some ports have not yet been tested as universal
> binaries and may not build properly. Or they may build but then not
> work on the foreign architecture. For some ports the universal
> variant has been expressly disabled, either because no way has been
> found to make it possible, or because nobody has yet tried to make it
> possible.
>
> Both the Intel and the PowerPC Mac must have the same major version
> of Mac OS X installed, preferably the same version entirely, and
> should have the same version of Xcode too. For example both must be
> running Tiger with Xcode 2.5, or both must be running Leopard with
> Xcode 3.0. Don't attempt this if they're running different major
> versions.
>
> MacPorts itself (i.e. the port command) is universal when installed
> from the MacPorts installation disk image. I'm not confident,
> however, that it remains universal after you've gone through a
> selfupdate. This would be a problem if you had done a selfupdate on
> the Intel Mac (and that selfupdate resulted in MacPorts base being
> rebuilt) and you still wanted to use the port command on the PowerPC
> Mac after you had copied the Intel Mac's MacPorts installation to it.