Re: gub targets + binary packages

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

Am Montag, den 07.10.2019, 19:23 +0000 schrieb Carl Sorensen:
> 
> On 10/7/19, 1:10 PM, "Jonas Hahnfeld" <
> address@hidden
> > wrote:
> 
>     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     out-of-date: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.
> 
> In my opinion, we could eliminate PowerPC support if it were broken.  Unless 
> some PowerPC user wants to step up and do the maintenance, I wouldn't be 
> concerned about removing it.  One of the theories of GUB is that the 
> developer time in minimized for maintaining cross-platform build.  But as we 
> can see, the theory doesn't always match  the practice.
> 
> But if it's not broken, I see no reason to remove it.  As long as the 
> developer time is zero, we should leave it.

Well, then let me give some context: There's motivation to port
LilyPond to Python3. This means that gub needs updated spec files,
making the effort non-zero.
Based on a short try, it's not immediately possible to cross-compile
Python 3 for macOS. I'm not saying it's infeasible, but I'm trying to
find out if it's a must to get it working on all current targets. I
totally agree that GUB is a great idea, but does it warrant delaying
modernization for other targets?

>     
>     >     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.
>     > 
>     >     
>     >     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.
> 
> That matches my understanding.

Well, you wrote it ;-P

Jonas

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