port mpkg deliverables for older systems?

[Ken Cunningham]

You might get this to work by setting the macosx_deployment_target in macports.conf to the minimum system you want to support.

See <https://trac.macports.org/changeset/66924> and <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/19875> among others.

Not many ports configure their patches based on macosx_deployment_target however; most use the ${os.major} which as I understand it is the build machine's OS and not set to the macosx_deployment_target. So the outcome of this is not fully certain.

Safest by far is to build on a machine or a VM of the system you want to support. VMs are available all the way back to Tiger. So that might be your better option, I would think.

Many on this list have been around for years and know this issue better than I do.

Ken






On 2017-09-22, at 2:47 PM, Joshua Kordani wrote:

> Greetings all.
> 
> I've found that the mpkg created from running port mpkg carries a dependency for the minimum OS on which the port mpkg call was made.  Is there any reason for this hard requirement?  I had been tasked with making installers for older versions of ports and their dependencies by cloning specific commits of the ports tree and building mpkg from there, but the system that I do this on makes mpkgs that require that version of the OS.  I wish to make mpkgs that will install on older version of macos, to wit, versions I know these combinations of packages and their dependencies support.  Is this generally considered a bad idea? In many cases it seems like the dependency installers are simply provided in binary form already, because I imagine the risk is that I would be building ports on a newer system and naively expecting them to work on an older one.
> 
> Any advice?
> 
> Joshua Kordani
>