Re: gub targets + binary packages

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

Am Montag, den 07.10.2019, 17:51 +0000 schrieb Carl Sorensen:
> 
> On 10/7/19, 11:27 AM, "lilypond-devel on behalf of Jonas Hahnfeld via 
> lilypond-devel" <
> lilypond-devel-bounces+c_sorensen=address@hidden
>  on behalf of 
> address@hidden
> > wrote:
> 
>     Hi all,
>     
>     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     out-of-date: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.
> 
> That doesn't mean there aren’t people using PowerPC macs.  I don't think 
> there is a reason to eliminate this target.

If my search skills are right, the last model with a PowerPC processor
was the Power Mac G5, with the latest revision released in late 2005.
That's almost 14 years ago (on October 19, if Wikipedia is correct).

What do you think would be a reasonable time frame to eliminate support
for old hardware? From my perspective, it's always a trade-off between
developer time and supporting users.

>     darwin-x86: Support for 32-bit applications was removed in today's
>     macOS 10.15.
>     (darwin-64 is not currently supported in gub.)
> 
> darwin-64 is not likely to be supportable in gub.  We've had some long 
> discussions on the -devel list; Apple has not released any 64-bit headers 
> that are GPL compatible.  So providing darwin-x86 is probably the best we can 
> do for supporting macOS users via the GUB distributions.  Again, no reason to 
> eliminate -x86 just because the latest version of OS X doesn't support it.  
> Many people (including me) have refused to update to 10.15 precisely because 
> it breaks existing software that works well for me.
> 
>     
>     freebsd-32 / freebsd-64: Apart from issues with the installer, the
>     binaries don't work on my virtual machine: gub links the executables to
>     a GNU libc which doesn't match the .so versions actually installed on a
>     current FreeBSD (FreeBSD 12.1: libc.so.7 vs libc.so.6 and libm.so.5 vs
>     libm.so.4). Even if the versions matched, I'm not sure that mixing
>     different libraries (GNU libc vs FreeBSD libc) would work. Maybe I'm
>     doing something wrong, does anyone use these pre-built binaries?
>     
>     linux-64 seems to work fine, linux-x86 is probably getting less
>     important with most distributions discontinuing support for 32-bit
>     kernels (yes, you could run 32-bit application on 64-bit kernels, but
>     still ...).
>     The most important target is probably Windows / mingw, which is also
>     32-bit but works on current 64-bit systems.
>   
> We also would like to get a 64-bit windows system going; 32-bit applications 
> sometimes crash on large scores.  As far as I know, it is only a question of 
> developer time to get a 64-bit windows build going.
>   
>  Thanks,
> 
> Carl
> 
> 
>

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