[PD] Building externals on OSX

Dan Wilcox danomatika at gmail.com
Tue Oct 22 23:34:22 CEST 2013


I'm not going to argue OS politics, again use what works best for you. I can understand the frustration with how the build system works on OSX. It is actually really nice in a lot of ways but it took me a while to get the hang of it after switching from Linux.

Without counting Debian, I still think there's really no need at this point to support a PPC build for OSX. When I wrote "drop PPC support" in earlier emails, I was referring only to OSX. The code as it is now should compile just fine on Debian PPC since the only architecture differences as far as I know would be compiling for little endian versus big endian on Intel. I don't think there are any architecture specific assembly / function calls in Pd.

So in the end, dropping OSX PPC support helps in simplifying the build scripts at least. Again, I think there's really no need to host newer Pd OSX PPC binaries, just leave the last one there since anyone using it will be on a much older version of OSX anyway.

On Oct 22, 2013, at 5:05 PM, pd-list-request at iem.at wrote:

>>> 
>>> Also, do you have any references for the claim that the vast majority of OSX
>>> users have moved away from PPC?
>> 
>> http://update.omnigroup.com/ (Hardware / CPU type): Intel 97.8% PPC 2.2%
>> 
>> https://www.adium.im/sparkle/ (CPU type): Intel 97.83% PPC 2.71%
> 
> Thanks.  Those are low numbers, but I'd imagine the number of PPC users is
> still fairly high:
> http://www.statisticbrain.com/apple-computer-company-statistics/
> 
>> 
>>> I find Jobs' claim that Apple doesn't ship
>>> junk to generally be true, and combined with their development model the
>>> unfortunate result would seem to be that poor people still using their once
>>> sleek and sexy devices are ignored along with their now ugly, unprofitable
>>> devices.
>> 
>> Well, those "sleek and sexy" PPC devices were last made & sold in 2005, so it's not a surprise the vast majority of people using OSX have Intel machines mainly because software developers (& the OS) have moved on to 32 bit and now 64 bit intel years ago.
> 
> Debian supports PPC, no?  Anyone know how it does on the old machines?  I suppose since Pd is in the repos one could say it still supports PPC. :)
> 
>> 
>> Your political bias notwithstanding (I say use what works for you),
> 
> Well, I'd call it a political stance.  And where it seemed quirky and deeply
> personal when I first adopted it, it now seems simply to be a restatement
> of the scientific method for computer security, at a time when there have
> been revelations that show our computers really need to be as secure as
> possible against attacks.
> 
> I'd also point out that yours is a political stance.  While I understand
> it, I must disagree with it because in terms of security it is much more
> difficult to use the scientific method to check whether the specs actually
> fit the implementation.  In some cases on proprietary OSes neither are
> known so you're forced to reverse engineer the software, and for
> complex systems that's too time consuming and expensive to do.

--------
Dan Wilcox
@danomatika
danomatika.com
robotcowboy.com





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