Re: [Gnumed-devel] Update on status of Mac OS 10.6 (darwin 10) Snow Leopard

[Sebastian Hilbert]

Am Sonntag 24 Januar 2010 16:34:43 schrieb Jim Busser:
> Changes made in Apple's Snow Leopard (OS 10.6) included native compilation
>  in 64-bit. This has complicated MacPorts on account of a combination of
>  some ports (analogous to Debian packages) being unable to build
>  "universal" (multi-architecturally e.g. 64-bit and 32-bit e.g.
>  postgresql84) and one of the python packages is unable yet to build in
>  64-bit hence depends on 32-bit.
> 
> MacPorts offers a work-around in the ability to override the default Mac OS
>  (Snow Leopard) behaviour and build instead just in 32-bit. There is a bug
>  in doing so that bites on of the dependencies maybe solvable in a build
>  from source of MacPorts 1.8.3 which I can maybe try in about ~ 1 month.
> 
> In the meantime it should still be possible to run GNUmed on MacPorts on
>  Leopard (OS 10.5).
> 
Don't get me wrong here but it seems like Apple's attitude towards this is why 
should we care.

If you (us) as a software developer want to go Mac we must play by their 
rules. That means we need to get those dmg images working and throw every 
dependency into that dmg.

Every dependency excluding postgresql that is. But then again someone needs to 
build a postgresql dmg.

Does Apple support Postgresql on their OS ? If not then Mac OS X is simply not 
suited for the server part. One can work around that but then you (the user) 
are on your own.

Hell, I like the looks of their hardware. I don't however spend insane amounts 
of time working around their OS design. I know better ways to spend my time.

Even if I set up a company I would have a hard time explaining my Linux 
customers why they should pay for devloper time invested into a Mac and 
Windows version that is insanely hard to make (in a user friendly way). 

But then again users buy iPhones.
http://www.strandreports.com/sw4031.asp

Long story short. I will try to support as many OS as possible but Apple makes 
it exceptionally hard to support their OS (Overpriced hardware, making it 
unlawful to run their OS on anything but their hardware, relying on all in one 
binaries instead of clean shared libraries)

Unless one of my collegues lets me access his Mac hardware (which is almost 
too much to ask) their is no legal way I can help out with the packages, even 
though I have a pretty good idea now how to make it work.

Rant mode off: Their is one solution I guess. We could buy Apple Hardware and 
OS for OS 10.5 and 10.6 and build seperate binaries for 32bit and 64 bit and 
provide them as dmg packages.

Due to their clever use of BSD one could potentially get a build environment 
going where a few shell scripts would automate the process.

One last thing. You can produce great software for Mas. See Osirix as an 
example. However don't expect to have this great software running on any 
*other* OS. OS X (parts of it) is closed source. Take it or leave it.

Sebastian