Installing gcc6 on a PPC Mac Mini 10.4 gives me hell

[Andreas Falkenhahn]

<rant>

So I installed gcc6 on my 10.5 G5 PowerMac a few days ago and it was a breeze.
It took just a few minutes. It looked like the installer just grabbed the binaries
and installed them. No big deal at all.

Now I am trying to install gcc6 on my 10.4 G4 Mac Mini and it seems to build
everything from sources and it's taking ages. Building apple-gcc42 took two
hours alone and that was just the first of many packages to come. 

I'm worried about my hardware because the CPU is at 100% all the time causing
the Mac Mini fan to be in full ventilation all the time. It has been running
like that for 3 hours now and there are still many more packages to go. If it's
going to continue at that speed, I'd estimate the gcc6 installation to take
about 12 hours or so.

Where does this difference come from? On my 10.5 G5 PowerMac it really was
just a few minutes and now it's taking hours. Yes, the G5 is faster but
certainly not that much. To me it looked as if on 10.5 binaries were
downloaded and installed whereas on 10.4 everything is built from scratch.
Is that right?

If it is, there really should be a warning that this is going to take ages
because once the thing has been started there's no way out since I don't
want to interrupt it in the middle of installing for fear of breaking
something. And I'm worried about my hardware. It's 13 years old and now
has to run under full stress for hours and hours and hours :-/ Why doesn't
Mac Ports simply provide ready to run binaries for 10.4 PPC? The current
installation process feels a little bit like maximum overdose for my
poor old PPC Mac Mini...

</rant>

-- 
Best regards,
 Andreas Falkenhahn                          mailto:andreas at falkenhahn.com