upgrade observations

[Rich Morin]

I recently migrated from a Power Mac to a Mac Pro.  Many things
"just worked", but some did not.  I tried copying my /opt tree
to the new system, for example, and all the commands worked.  I
assume that the OSX Rosetta feature was responsible.

However, when I naively attempted to upgrade a port, all !@#$%
broke loose.  It seems that, although the Mac Pro can run PPC
binaries, MacPorts isn't very smart about upgrading them.  So,
it tried to link PPC and Intel binaries together.

I'm not sure exactly what to suggest.  I'm kind of late to the
Intel party, so it may be that there aren't all that many PPCs
left out there to replace.  However, here are some ideas...

  *  It would be useful to have a way (eg, port list explicit)
     to list ports that have been explicitly built on a system.
     For example, I've now rebuilt erlang and git-core.  However,
     when I invoke "port list installed", I see 50+ entries.  If
     I'm trying to figure out what commands to run, in order to
     rebuild my ports, this is not terribly useful.

  *  At a minimum, MacPorts should keep track of processor type
     information for relocatable binaries, libraries, etc.  The
     suite should NOT try to build executables from mixtures of
     PPC and Intel files.

     It might be nice to offer the user a choice of building an
     Intel or PPC binary, then using the right input files.  If
     this is too difficult, a simple nastygram would suffice...

-r
-- 
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm            Rich Morin
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume     rdm at cfcl.com
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog     +1 650-873-7841

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