[Adonthell-devel] Re: Progress on Universal Binaries ...

[Kai Sterker]

On 10/7/07, Kai Sterker <address@hidden> wrote:

Some updates on the status here:

I got the dependencies for v0.3 and v0.4 installed in a way that they
will be compatible with OSX 10.2.8/PPC and newer as well as OSX
10.4/Intel. (The problem being that backwards compatibility requires
compiling with gcc 3.3 for the PPC part and gcc 4.0 for the Intel
part. SDL has a nice script for automating this.

The trouble starts with compiling Adonthell and is related to Python.
Which comes pre-installed on OSX, so it shouldn't be a problem, I
thought. However, OSX 10.2.8 comes with Python 2.2, while 10.3 and
10.4 come with Python 2.3. 10.5 might come with yet another version.

I now do remember that the first release of Adonthell for OSX didn't
run on 10.3 unless you installed a python2.2 stub package I put
together:

    http://adonthell.linuxgames.com/files/python2.2-stub.pkg.tar.gz

So my fear is that if I wanted to retain compatibility to 10.2.8, I'd
have to compile the PPC part against Python 2.2 and users of never
versions had to install that additional package. In an ideal world,
however, it should work out of the box on the recent version and users
of prior versions should have to install the updated Python.

Looking around, the only release of Python compatible with 10.2.8
appears to be version 2.3.3 from
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~jack/macpython/ . So that might be the way to
go ...

Even better would be to include Python in the Adonthell package (like
on Windows), because then we'd be independent from whatever version is
pre-installed. But a quick go at compiling Python 2.5.1 didn't turn
out successful. I got a "python.exe" (!) that started up fine, but
failed loading the math module ... haven't looked further into that
since.


In a way, it seems to me that the Windows-port experience is repeating
itself. That took at least half a year to get things set up nicely,
including the work of Alex and Joel on the CMake build scripts. And
while I'd like to do the same here -- figure out and document how to
set up the perfect environment for OSX development and deployment ---
I'd like to move on to more interesting things. Like coding ;-).

So here I am ... I could drop support for 10.2 and 10.3, recompile
(again!) all the dependencies and be done with it. Or I can try to be
nice (remembering how I felt when more and more apps where dropping
support for 10.2 ... the main reason to finally upgrade to 10.4) and
produce something that's compatible. Not really sure which way to go
...

Anyone with a Mac around that is still running Jaguar or Panther?


As an aside, I stumbled across http://macdylibbundler.sourceforge.net/
which is exactly what we need for packaging up all the libraries with
the Adonthell app bundle :-). That will make things so much easier
once I actually get stuff built!

Kai


> Some information about the stuff I did today ... for discussion or
> just for protocol.
>
> I spent some time installing Adonthell's prerequisites on OSX/Intel
> today. Since I was starting from scratch I thought I could as well
> make sure to build everything as universal binaries, so that Adonthell
> could be build as universal binary too. What I did so far is
> documented here:
>
>     
> http://cvs.savannah.nongnu.org/viewvc/adonthell/README.MacOSX?root=adonthell&view=markup
>
> I really only got as far as step 4, the rest is speculation for now.
> I'll update it once I proceed any further.
>
> Kai
>
> P.S: I've also installed the beta of Ubuntu 7.10 and most of
> Adonthell's dependencies on a separate Linux partition. Have yet to
> try and compile it with gcc 4.2 though ...
>