On Jun 3, 2006, at 7:12 PM, Alan Horkan wrote:

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.

Dont suppose Apple provide a free cross compiler? I'm well pleased by the cross compiled Inkscape binaries for windows.

-- Alan

Apple's tools... well, depends on your definition of free. But they're all gratis, and the ability to target multiple architectures is certainly free and courtesy of GCC. I'm not sure if their linker is open-source, not to mention lipo. In theory, there's no reason you couldn't put every single target up on the same build server somewhere. In practice, you'd probably at least have to be running opendarwin to build with Apple's GCC.

Problem is, fink doesn't support universal binaries. I guess what this means is that to get to a universal binary you:

a) build with fink on an Intel box, then a PPC box, then merge with lipo b) switch to darwinports (allegedly support universal binaries) c) curl the packages and script a universal build from source (rewrite fink)

I'm not really sure if fink is considered to be part of the Inkscape build process. Am I going out on a limb if I stray from the build instructions? Is it better to stick with fink because it provides a distribution channel?

--David