several ports that now use meson to build won't build +universal any longer -- muniversal portgroup fixes them

[Ken Cunningham]

It turns out the issue is with llvm-ar. 

meson appears to look for this and use it over "ar" if it is found, but on my systems, llvm-ar does not appear to do the right thing with fat static libs, even if llvm-ar is part of a universal build of llvm...

you only have llvm-ar bare like that in MacPorts if you have "sudo port select" ed some version of llvm, which I had done, Deselecting any llvm's removes llvm-ar, and then all is well again.

General fix? Don't know yet. You can force ar with an env var; or patch meson to ignore llvm-ar; or...fix llvm-ar, whatever is going on with it...

K

> On Mar 11, 2020, at 00:47, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Mar 4, 2020, at 14:46, Ken Cunningham wrote:
>> 
>> just a heads-up -- the meson build system does not handle building +universal very well, as we know. So far I've had to add the muniversal PortGroup to
>> 
>> at-spi2-atk and gdk-pixbuf2
>> 
>> to allow them to build universal, and I would not be surprised if that list continues to grow.
>> 
>> A general fix in meson might be unlikely, due to the way it builds things.
>> 
>> This is on 10.6.8, but I suspect that is not relevant to this at present.
> 
> If meson is unable to build universal the "normal" all-at-once way, and requires separate builds for each arch and combining using "lipo" as the "muniversal" portgroup does, then it seems preposterous to ask the maintainer of each meson-using port to do that manually. Just make the meson portgroup do it automatically.
> 
> We've already talked about this here:
> 
> https://trac.macports.org/ticket/5986
>