context team mailing list archive

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 13:40, Taco Hoekwater wrote:
> Yue Wang wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> right.
>>
>> btw, maybe we can try to build universal binaries (x86_64 + i386) for
>> minimals on OS X...
>
> I do not have time (nor knowledge) to figure that out myself, but
> patches are more than welcome, of course.

The universal binaries are there already. Building directly might be a
bit problematic in complex building procedures, so we use lipo to
combine binaries together. As a conseqence we need to build all the
binaries separately anyway. Minimals could use universal binaries, but
that would have a disadvantage of bigger size and no real advantage
unless I fail to see it).

Oliver has started building some installer and that one would be free
to use the universal binaries if it ever gets built.

As soon as there will be some apparent advantage, one only needs to
patch ConTeXt core to recognize any mac as "osx-universal" instead of
"osx-intel".

> I think just add two -arch will do the job. I am trying  to build
> luatex universal binaries  now and will send the patch to you later...

It can even be that this works for LuaTeX/pdftex/metapost, but it
fails for XeTeX (for XeTeX I'm not even able to build the binaries for
Tiger on Leopard). I figured out it would be far easier to just use
lipo instead of using two architectures, but that's pretty much
irrelevant question.

The real question is: why would we want to use universal binaries? As
soon as some plausible reason comes, switching to universal is a
matter of:
- tiny change in core
- users will need to patch "first-setup.sh" (that's going to be
renamed/rewritten anyway) and fetch new binaries for osx-universal
instead of osx-[intel|ppc]
Everything else is probably there already.

Mojca