Compilers and Variants and Architectures Oh My!

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 25, 2013, at 12:55, Peter Johansson wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 7:45 PM, Lawrence Velázquez wrote:
> 
>> Not only would it waste space, it would prevent you from using our pre-built binaries for nearly all ports. We only build +universal packages for dependencies of i386-only ports.
> 
> How does one access these binaries?  I'd *much* prefer to obtain
> binaries than compile from source on my archaic machine.

MacPorts will automatically fetch and use these binaries if they're available, assuming you have not set "buildfromsource always" in macports.conf. You must use the default MacPorts prefix /opt/local, default applications_dir /Applications/MacPorts, default frameworks_dir /opt/local/Library/Frameworks, default build_arch x86_64, and default variants. Also as Larry said binaries are only available for Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion at this time. Also binaries are not available for all ports, often due to license restrictions.