Even though I do believe that Universal building is a bit of a waste of space more often than not for most, I do buy into the simplicity such builds report for users that only have to go looking for a single download link. Maybe Markus could advise us on how we could achieve this through the MacPorts Portfile (sudo port dmg MacPorts)? In any case, for the time being while we have separate dmg's for different felines, I already cleared up a bit the instructions on www.macports.org/install.php so that it's clear which one is needed for each platform. Maun Suang, since you reported to me that you already got the Panther dmg built, and that the errors you're experiencing (ui_prefix) manifest themselves regardless of whether you install from the dmg or from source, what would you say about uploading that dmg regardless of the bug? Kevin introduced some code to hunt down those errors, but that wont see the light of day until 1.6.1, which is orthogonal to the dmg. Regards,.... -jmpp On Dec 28, 2007, at 1:34 PM, Rainer Müller wrote:
Ryan Schmidt wrote:
Rainer, would you prefer for us to distribute 5 different disk images of MacPorts then -- Panther PowerPC, Tiger PowerPC, Tiger Intel, Leopard PowerPC, Leopard Intel?
A disk image with four architectures will be around four times bigger than it needs to be... Why should anybody want to download a large file if 3/4 are useless data and just occupy disk space?
Apple wants developers to make universal binaries so that users don't need to care what kind of processor they have. Other Mac developers are making universal binaries. We should too. And we already do. We just have separate images for Panther, Tiger and Leopard right now. And I'd like to unify that as well so that we end up with a single downloadable for our software, like most other Mac developers already have.
So why does Apple not just provide a interface to strip uneeded architectures right on installing? Instead, they copy useless data. I don't understand this... At least one can do it himself and remove them with ditto.
We already had several cases where users downloaded the Leopard MacPorts disk image, installed it on Tiger, and of course it didn't work. So distributing a single disk image which works everywhere is simpler for users.
[Those stupid users should learn to read...]
But if you download an universal disk image; after the first selfupdate, which you normally do after install to get a newer minor version, you will end up with a single architecture - the one of your system. Why should disk images distribute a different version than selfupdate?
I don't want to debate over support universal building for ports, somebody might need it. And I don't want to say that universal in general is bad.
Rainer