Re: gub targets + binary packages

[Werner LEMBERG]

> lately I've been playing with gub, partly to get python3
> packaged. Upon inspection, it seems some targets are broken and some
> are ... a bit out-of-date:
>
> darwin-ppc: Support for applications targeting PowerPC was removed
> in Darwin 11.0 / Mac OS X 10.7, released in 2011.
>
> darwin-x86: Support for 32-bit applications was removed in today's
> macOS 10.15.

... well, there are still a lot of computers out there using those old
MacOS versions...

While MacPorts would be an alternative to get a working LilyPond
installation on those old targets I think we shouldn't disable them as
long it is feasible to support them.

> (darwin-64 is not currently supported in gub.)

*This* is a major problem and should be handled with priority!

However, licensing issues make it necessary that Mac binaries are
built on a Mac (cross compilation is explicitly not allowed if you are
going to use xcode, and GUB needs it).  There are two possibilities,
already discussed earlier in the list, to solve this problem.

* Use MacPort's `mpkg' feature to create an MPKG bundle.  Right now,
  you get a 200MByte package with the command

    port mpkg lilypond-devel +mactex +perl5_28

  This assumes that you have MacTeX installed (and a path to the
  binary added to the MacPorts configuration file), which is only
  needed for building the bundle; it is not a runtime dependency.

  To further reduce the bundle it would be necessary to post-process
  it, removing all unnecessary files (mainly documentation, test
  files, etc., from dependencies) with a home-brewed script.

* Port GUB to the Mac, then adding support to download and use a
  recent xcode version.

> [...]  Do we have numbers about how often each binary is downloaded
> / used?

IIRC this was already asked some time ago on the list, and the answer
then was no.


   Werner