On Wed, 28 Feb 2007, jiho wrote:
On 2007-February-28 , at 01:29 , bulia byak wrote:
[...] However the most frequently reported problem is still not fixed: it does not work on OSX 10.3.9. Is there anyone on Mac who could look into this and report if this is fixable at all?
I think Michael looked at the problem. I read all messages about these crashes and all different bug reports boil down to one problem (but I am not authorized to mark things as duplicate in the tracker). The easiest way to solve it would be to have some of these people compile Inkscape on 10.3.9 and send us a binary to distribute specifically for 10.3.9.
I have indeed looked into this extensively. There are a couple of things that determine the dependencies for our final binary in terms of OS X version. There is a MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET variable used at compile time, and the SDK that all the dependencies are compiled against, GTK, etc. For building the Universal package (which has been working great on 10.4 machines incidently) I have compiled everything with: MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.4 SDK="/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk"
We could use a 10.4 machine to compile a package for 10.3.9 users but it (and all Inkscape's dependencies) would need to be compiled with: MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.3 SDK="/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.3.9.sdk" And all would have to be built for PPC. This package would then work for 10.3.9 and 10.4.x users on PPC
It is physically possible to provide one package that works for everyone, from 10.3.9 onwards, but the Intel side would have to be compiled with the first set of options and the PPC side with the second set and then all lipo'ed together. There is no way you can pass this information to gcc to compile both at once like I do with '-arch ppc -arch i386' for the current 10.4.x universal packages. Very frustrating!!
Meanwhile, I should add some polish to Mac compiling with DarwinPorts so that it becomes easy for them (I don't think we need to produce a Universal binary for 10.3 users, Intel macs were out only after 10.4 was out, were'nt they?). More news soon.
I think it would be ideal if we could find a 10.3.9 user, as you suggest, who can compile and build and more importantly test this package. I have to borrow an old 10.3.9 machine when I want to test on that now, and it is only going to become harder for you or I to support 10.3.9 users ourselves once Leopard (10.5) is soon released.
Definitely all Universal packages I put up in future I will label as "tiger" or "10.4". I actually wouldn't mind just dropping support for 10.3.9 if we can't find someone who can easily produce packages for it -- say that 0.4x is the last version of Inkscape to support OS X 10.3.9.
And yes, you're correct in thinking 10.3 was PPC only, so that simplifies things a bit.
Cheers, Michael