Universal issues

[Randall Wood]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 5:58 AM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> On Jun 11, 2008, at 07:06, Rainer Müller wrote:
>
>> Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>>> Does universal mean "it works at full performance on all
>>> architectures"? In this case, ports like this that install no
>>> architecture-specific files should be modified to have an empty
>>> universal variant selected by default.
>>>
>>> Or does universal mean "it has more than one architecture of compiled
>>> software"? In this case, no-arch ports should be modified to turn off
>>> the universal variant to indicate that a universal build of this port
>>> is not applicable. I believe this definition of universal has been
>>> used in several other no-arch ports before.
>>
>> I see "universal" as "can be compiled to work on multiple
>> architectures". If +universal is missing, I assume that this is never
>> going to work on multiple architectures with just one build. But maybe
>> we can change this to give even more information.
>>
>> I think we need some way to distinguish the four cases for the user:
>>    1) Arch independent
>>    2) Can be build universal
>>    3) Builds always universal (because the build system does that)
>
> I think we should strive not to have this situation... if the port
> builds universal by default, an effort should be made to change the
> build so that it builds non-universal by default, and universal only
> when the universal variant is chosen. I know Anthony did this for
> many ports. For my ports that build universal by default I did not do
> this (sleepwatcher, and I just found out adtpro), and I should go
> back and fix this.

I don't think this needs to be fixed in most cases, as most of the
ports that do this are Cocoa-based ports that the upstream developers
have begun to build universally.

-- 
Randall Wood
randall.h.wood at alexandriasoftware.com

"The rules are simple: The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes.
All the rest is just philosophy."