Thanks for the detailed response. I don't know enough about compiling
to come up with a universal build, so I guess I'll stick with an intel
only build. If I may, I have a follow up on the platform
constraints. So these constraints have nothing to do with what
systems the compiled binaries will run on. Is that right? I seem to
recall reading somewhere that macport builds will run on 10.4 and
higher if I install with 10.5. Looking at the macports guide, it
looks like if there is no "configure.compiler" line in the port file
and if I'm using 10.5.6, then the default is gcc-4.0 which will result
in 10.4 and 10.5 friendly binaries. Am understanding that correctly?
Thanks.
On May 13, 2009, at 7:38 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
On May 13, 2009, at 12:25, EmmGunn wrote:
I'm looking at the different variants for mplayer and most of them
are self explanatory, but I have a couple of questions. I noticed
this in the port file:
83 # configure is not autoconf
84 universal_variant no
which I took to mean that a universal variant is not available,
That's correct. Because mplayer does not use a standard autoconf
configure script, the standard universal variant does not work with
it. If someone wanted to invest some time in figuring out how to
make mplayer compile universal, it could probably be done by writing
a custom universal variant for that port.
but then I see a binary_codecs variant which has something about
powerpc and i386. What does this do exactly? Is this something
equivalent to a universal variant? I was hoping to compile a
universal build of mplayer.
Sorry, the port says "universal_variant no", which means someone
tried to build a universal binary and found that it failed, and
added this to the portfile to save you the trouble. If you really
want a universal binary, you will have to write a custom universal
variant for this port. If you do, please contribute it back to us so
that we can put it in the portfile.
Also, just out of curiosity, what are the darwin and darwin_8
variants. I couldn't find anything about them either. Thanks in
advance for any help.
These are platform variants. If they are present in a portfile,
MacPorts automatically selects them on the appropriate platform.
"darwin" variants are selected on operating systems based on Darwin,
including Mac OS X. darwin_8 is selected on Darwin 8.x operating
systems, such as Mac OS X 10.4.x. Darwin 9.x would be Mac OS X
10.5.x, and so on. darwin_i386 is selected if you're running Darwin
(or Mac OS X) on an Intel processor. darwin_powerpc is selected if
you're running Darwin (or Mac OS X) on a PowerPC processor. You
never select these variants manually; MacPorts does it for you if
necessary. Ports use these variants if they need different
instructions to build correctly in different kinds of environments.
The description of the binary_codecs variant says "Enable platform-
specific binary codecs". Most ports in MacPorts are compiled from
source but sometimes bits are only available as pre-compiled
binaries, as is apparently the case for the codecs this variant
wants to enable. This variant seems to be designed to download one
file for PowerPC computers and a different file for Intel computers,
and then install their contents. However, I don't believe the
variant functions as intended. It checks whether variants
darwin_i386 or darwin_powerpc are set. Since the port does not
declare any variants by those names, those variants are never set,
hence the binary_codecs variant never does anything. This is a bug
in the portfile. It looks like when the binary_codecs variant was
set up in r20652, darwin_i386 and darwin_powerpc variants did exist
in the port, but they were subsequently removed without considering
the effect that would have on the binary_codecs variant. I fixed
this bug just now, but now the variant produces an error. Since I'm
not an MPlayer expert I filed a ticket for this problem:
http://trac.macports.org/ticket/19619
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