Do I need +universal to be used when installing ports?

[Ryan Schmidt]

> On Apr 29, 2017, at 10:13, Richard L. Hamilton <rlhamil at smart.net> wrote:
> 
> In favor of getting rid of it, the pre-built binaries (much faster to install or upgrade) aren't built +universal; so if you get rid of it, you'll often get them.  Some things aren't pre-built, so you won't always get them, but it's still way faster.
> 
> There may be some ports or port options that need i386 (I don't know), but they should do the right thing.  (that's not based on massive familiarity, so someone that knows more than I may know of exceptions to that statement)
> 
> I would _guess_ therefore, that it would only matter if you have i386 code of your own that links with libraries provided by MacPorts.  You'd be the one that would know that.

Some ports only work 32-bit, such as wine. If you install one of those ports, its dependencies, if any, will install universal.

The buildbot will in fact build those dependencies universal and upload them too. There are situations where these are not up date, so you can run into dependencies that are not available as prebuilt universal binaries, though they could be. We hope to improve this in the future.

But to answer your original question, I would agree that you don't need to install ports universal, unless you have a specific use for that.