On Sun, 4 Jun 2006, Alan Horkan wrote:
On Sat, 3 Jun 2006, Ben Fowler wrote:
On 03/06/06, David Himelright <himelright.2@...1307...> wrote:
Incidentally, I wish our lab had some Intel Macs so I could offer to patch the packaging scripts for universal binary, but I might be able to find one if I look around.
David, we very definitely need someone to investigate producing a Universal Binary for version 0.44; I cannot see my way to doing anything about it.
There is a request in the tracker for Universal binaries, please add a comment if you have time. I marked it very low priority since despite being something we'd all like in theory, it is highly dependant on the availability of hardware and developers and we'd be very lucky for it to happen at all.
In theory I know how to do it. I've done some reading as well as quizing Aaron Voisine on the process he uses to build a Universal version of Gimp.app. The easiest way to do this is to build two idential versions on two machines (one PPC, one x86) and use the Apple tool lipo to build a single universal version of each of the executables/libraries from the different arcitecture versions. This is what is done for Gimp.app.
(lipo man page: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/lipo...)
The only reason I have not yet tried the above approach is that I don't have access to an Intel MAC. I was actually thinking that one good use of Inkscape's savings might be to purchase a cheap Intel Mac (i.e, MacMini). In theory one would only need shell access so this headless box could live anywhere as long as it had a fast connection. Probably though it would be better if it lived with one of the Mac developers so some amount of testing could be done.
I'd been thinking in the last few days that it might be ok for such a machine to live at Monash University, since there are now four or five from our research group contributing to Inkscape. I haven't yet talked to our supervisor or any of the tech people but that was an idea. I do think it is really important to have an Intel build of Inkscape for 0.44 or shortly after.
In theory you could try rebuilding a fink tree with all Inkscape's dependencies compiled as Universal libraries, though I imagine this would be more trouble that it is worth.
Dont suppose Apple provide a free cross compiler? I'm well pleased by the cross compiled Inkscape binaries for windows.
Yes, Apple's gcc-4.0 is a cross compiler. It can build target code for either PPC or x86. The problem is that building or app bundle requires having Universal (dual arcitecture) copies of all the fink libraries that we drag into the app bundle.
Cheers, Michael