Tiger and MacPorts

[Ken Cunningham]

Many recent ports have moved to using meson. A number of them require a fairly current version of meson. meson assumes, at present, @rpath support for Darwin. That means 10.5 and above.

I have previously been able to fix / hack meson to avoid this, but this meson is a fast-changing beast, and the latest versions have changed most of the way this is done. It seems quite a bit more difficult to tweak it, when I last looked at it.

Short story -- mostly everything that uses meson is currently broken on Tiger. So -- my advice is do not update Tiger until you hear this is fixed, because you will be out of commission.

I like Tiger -- and a few others do -- but unless we can fix this, this is possibly the end of Tiger.

meson devs have been asked to consider covering this, but realistically, Tiger is a really ancient system and it's not very likely anyone will do that work upstream.

Windows does not use @rpaths either. So perhaps we can go down the Windows pathways.


An alternate idea is to make a shell script wrapper around ld64-97 to reformat -rpath link commands into something more palatable that ld64-97 can process. This sounds a bit ridiculous, but there are already a number of unix scripts out there, written in various different languages, that apparently do a pretty good job of this. if anyone is game for a fun project :>

Best,

Ken