info

[James Secan]

I think a large number of us are very interested in the status of ports vis-a-vis both Apple Silicon (M1) and Big Sur.  Some sort of simple red-yellow-green status board for ports that have been checked would be very useful.  Verified support for the MacPorts codes I use regularly is a major check-box on my buy-now list for a new M1 machine.  I suspect this is more easily visualized than actually produced and maintained.

Jim
3222 NE 89th St
Seattle, WA 98115
(206) 430-0109

> On Dec 4, 2020, at 1:50 PM, Mojca Miklavec <mojca at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 27 Nov 2020 at 16:27, Giovanni Cantele wrote:
>> 
>> Dear All,.
>> 
>> I’m searching the web but I cannot find any response to the following question:
>> 
>> is there any ongoing project for porting the whole macports staff on the new Apple silicon architecture?
> 
> There is no "special ongoing project". There are volunteer owners of
> Apple silicon trying to fix the bugs they encounter.
> MacPorts itself should work, lots of ports work, some complex software
> requires non-trivial patches from upstream.
> 
>> What happens to those who extensively make use of macports and have bought the recent released MacBook Pro running on the new processors?
> 
> You should be able to install MacPorts and many ports. But you should
> not be surprised if you hit some that will refuse to build and you may
> need to wait for upstream to fix the issue (or try to fix it yourself
> and submit a patch or find someone else capable of fixing it ...).
> 
> You brought up an interesting point though, we should probably publish
> some official statement about arm support on our main website.
> 
> On Fri, 4 Dec 2020 at 16:19, Alejandro Imass wrote:
>> 
>> What you are saying suggests that nothing major has changed except the LLVM target to arm64, is this correct?
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't have any experience with an arm-based mac.
> 
> As far as MacPorts is concerned, I would say that indeed "almost
> nothing major" has changed in principle (other than the processor,
> which is ... well, a really major change).
> 
> A lot of relatively simple, well-written software with a well-written
> build system should often work out of the box.
> 
> But a lot of software may either have some hard-coded assumptions in
> either their build system or the source, it may require some
> intel-specific intrinsics, or it may depend on some complex
> third-party library that doesn't compile. Apple also likes to increase
> security standards each year which may break many ports in various
> ways.
> 
> If you have your favourite port, you can quickly check the build
> results on, say,
>    https://ports.macports.org/port/wget/stats
> and check for either green port status or some reported installations
> on arm64, check for open tickets etc. Keep in mind that many port
> builds haven't been attempted yet.
> 
> (I also see that some builds like wget were successful, but missing on
> the list, while some like youtube-dl are redirected to the x86_64
> builder and also don't end up on that list.)
> 
> Mojca