Three questions about speeding up macports builds

Ken Cunningham ken.cunningham.webuse at gmail.com
Thu Apr 18 19:40:27 UTC 2019


First of all, welcome! MacPorts is by far your best bet at keeping your PowerMac useful.

I hope you get to the point where you might contribute to that maintenance as well someday.

> Has anyone here used ccache with macports?

I set it up and gave it a try, but in the end I found the cache hits were too low despite bumping up the cache size. Some do use it. It's mostly useful for repeated builds, of course, which is not the norm in general for MacPorts end-users. Perhaps there is a way I might set ccache up better than I have.

> 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).

There is work done on this, but on a system as new as Mojave, you will not have much luck. <https://github.com/jhnbwrs/macportsGCCfixup>

Much better is to set up a VM with Leopard Intel Server and try your hand at cross compiling with that system. I have that now, and there are times it is helpful. Most often, it is not helpful.

Some ports currently in MacPorts are no longer compatible with Leopard. I have stashed some of the last working versions of those ports in here <https://github.com/kencu/TigerPorts>. You might find that useful at times, or perhaps you might contribute to it someday. If possible, we like to roll those fixes in the MacPorts mainline, but sometimes that is just not reasonable, ie for for the Leopard PPC version of SDL2.


Best,

Ken
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-users/attachments/20190418/d6d9a687/attachment.html>


More information about the macports-users mailing list