Three questions about speeding up macports builds.

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 18, 2019, at 09:17, Christian Calderon wrote:

> I'm setting up my Power Mac FW800 as a little home server, and I decided to install some things. Of course, there are no prebuilt binaries for Leopard PPC

Only because the Power Mac we use for building them is offline because it's having a hard drive problem that I haven't finished diagnosing and fixing. Binaries of ports that haven't been updated within the last month or so are available for Leopard PPC. 

> so I end up compiling everything. A couple of days ago I started compiling some things, and in the meantime I read a bit on speeding up compilation. I found that there are projects for cross compiling binaries for OS X from a Linux host, and I also discovered the existence of ccache and distcc. This brings me to my questions:
> 
> Has anyone on this list used distcc with macports?
> Has anyone here used ccache with macports?

MacPorts base has had support for distcc and ccache for many years, although individual ports might not support them. I have used ccache on my personal Mac for a long time. I have not tried distcc. 

> Is it possible to use a new Mac in combination with distcc to compile things for Leopard PPC?

My understanding is that all the machines which you want to include in the distcc network should be running the same version of macOS and Xcode on the same processor architecture. 

> I believe it should be possible for me to install the old version of Xcode in Mojave, thereby having access to the old SDK and compilers used in Leopard. If I could use my new iMac to assist in compiling things for my Power Macs, that could be a HUGE speed up (my iMac has a 9900k while my FW800 has two 1.42GHz G4 processors lol).

I anticipate that you might succeed with this in isolated cases but not in the general case. I don't recommend pursuing this.  

> Please share your thought and experiences if any of you have looked into similar things. Thanks!
> 
> ~Chris