I think a large number of us are very interested in the status of ports vis-a-vis both Apple Silicon (M1) and Big Sur. Some sort of simple red-yellow-green status board for ports that have been checked would be very useful. Verified support for the MacPorts codes I use regularly is a major check-box on my buy-now list for a new M1 machine. I suspect this is more easily visualized than actually produced and maintained.
Jim 3222 NE 89th St Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 430-0109 > On Dec 4, 2020, at 1:50 PM, Mojca Miklavec <mo...@macports.org> wrote: > > On Fri, 27 Nov 2020 at 16:27, Giovanni Cantele wrote: >> >> Dear All,. >> >> I’m searching the web but I cannot find any response to the following >> question: >> >> is there any ongoing project for porting the whole macports staff on the new >> Apple silicon architecture? > > There is no "special ongoing project". There are volunteer owners of > Apple silicon trying to fix the bugs they encounter. > MacPorts itself should work, lots of ports work, some complex software > requires non-trivial patches from upstream. > >> What happens to those who extensively make use of macports and have bought >> the recent released MacBook Pro running on the new processors? > > You should be able to install MacPorts and many ports. But you should > not be surprised if you hit some that will refuse to build and you may > need to wait for upstream to fix the issue (or try to fix it yourself > and submit a patch or find someone else capable of fixing it ...). > > You brought up an interesting point though, we should probably publish > some official statement about arm support on our main website. > > On Fri, 4 Dec 2020 at 16:19, Alejandro Imass wrote: >> >> What you are saying suggests that nothing major has changed except the LLVM >> target to arm64, is this correct? > > Disclaimer: I don't have any experience with an arm-based mac. > > As far as MacPorts is concerned, I would say that indeed "almost > nothing major" has changed in principle (other than the processor, > which is ... well, a really major change). > > A lot of relatively simple, well-written software with a well-written > build system should often work out of the box. > > But a lot of software may either have some hard-coded assumptions in > either their build system or the source, it may require some > intel-specific intrinsics, or it may depend on some complex > third-party library that doesn't compile. Apple also likes to increase > security standards each year which may break many ports in various > ways. > > If you have your favourite port, you can quickly check the build > results on, say, > https://ports.macports.org/port/wget/stats > and check for either green port status or some reported installations > on arm64, check for open tickets etc. Keep in mind that many port > builds haven't been attempted yet. > > (I also see that some builds like wget were successful, but missing on > the list, while some like youtube-dl are redirected to the x86_64 > builder and also don't end up on that list.) > > Mojca