MacPorts downloaded package with wrong architecture on arm64 machine

[Ian Wadham]

I recently purchased a new MacBook Pro with Monterey O/S and installed MacPorts on it from scratch.

I installed the qt4-mac port successfully, but kdelibs4 refused to install because the qt4-mac port did
not support arm64 architecture and i am on an Apple Silicon arm64 machine.

The problem arose because the installation process for qt4-mac included the steps:

—>  Attempting to fetch qt4-mac-4.8.7_13.darwin_21.x86_64.tbz from https://packages.macports.org/qt4-mac
—>  Attempting to fetch qt4-mac-4.8.7_13.darwin_21.x86_64.tbz.rmd160 from https://packages.macports.org/qt4-mac

The second step succeeded, i.e. MacPorts itself downloaded an inappropriate package for an Apple
Silicon machine. I noticed that some (maybe not all) of qt4-mac’s dependencies were compiled or
downloaded as arm64 code and, curiously, some of Qt4’s utility apps work on my machine, perhaps
due to the Rosetta emulator stepping in and taking over.

The kdelibs4 install failed in the “Computing dependencies…” step, saying “Error: Cannot install kdelibs4 for
the arch arm64 because its dependency qt4-mac only supports the archs ‘ppc ppc64 i386 x86_64’”

Is this a bug or is it the end of the line for kdelibs4 on arch64? Can kdelibs4 really build as arch64? And what
about its (enormous) list of other dependencies? Do they all build for arch64?

If there is a bug here, I think it is that MacPorts can download a package for an inappropriate architecture.

Best regards,
Ian Wadham.