Progress Report Please

Message

BennyP · Post by **BennyP** » Mon Jan 03, 2005 9:35 pm

How is the state of Gentoo/MacOSX?? is the next version production-ready yet?

JoseJX · Post by **JoseJX** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 8:52 am

What do you mean by production ready? There are people who think gentoo itself isn't production ready! If you're using it, it's production ready. :)

I guess as an update, yes, progress has slowed but packages are still being marked for ppc-macos and there was a new installer released recently. If you'd like to see more packages marked stable, please test packages and submit bug reports please.

Thanks!

BennyP · Post by **BennyP** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 9:29 pm

where is the installer??

does gentoo still conflict with fink?

JoseJX · Post by **JoseJX** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 9:43 pm

The installer is located here: http://www.metadistribution.org/macos/
I'm not sure about fink, that's out of our control.

BennyP · Post by **BennyP** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 10:03 pm

Ok, so before I install, I want to be clear about what the advantage is.

Gentoo allows me to use more up to date developer tools, correct? including GCC, glib, libtool, etc.

My goal is to try to get as much F/OSS GNU/Linux audio software to run on Mac OS X as I can.

JoseJX · Post by **JoseJX** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 12:10 am

No actually, at this point, we're still using XCode and as many OSX tools as possible.

We're not really far enough along to really allow building most audio tools, many require qt or gtk+, neither of which currently compile on OSX due to a number of open issues.

BennyP · Post by **BennyP** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 9:36 pm

i'm using them both right now with hydrogen and gimp
qt has an osx 'native' quartz version

JoseJX · Post by **JoseJX** » Fri Jan 07, 2005 3:47 am

The open issues I was refering to were in regards to using these packages with portage. Yes, the software does run on OSX, but it can't currently be installed by portage.

vandahm · Post by **vandahm** » Fri Jan 28, 2005 7:56 pm

BennyP wrote:Ok, so before I install, I want to be clear about what the advantage is.

The advantage is the time saved from not having to track down tons of dependencies (and dependencies of dependencies) each time you want to install some Unix tools on OS X. Not everything I want to install is supported by Portage yet, but even when that happens I haven't lost anything, since I would have had to install the software and dependencies myself anyway had Portage not been available.

BennyP wrote:Gentoo allows me to use more up to date developer tools, correct? including GCC, glib, libtool, etc.

The developer tools supplied by Apple support a number of features that aren't available in the mainstream versions. In particular, standard GCC doesn't support Apple's "Objective C++," and I don't think things like Frameworks are supported by the mainstream developer tools. If you were to replace Apple's GCC with another one from Portage, you would lose the ability to compile many OS X programs.

As an example of how frustrating this might be, look at the GNUstep project. They're developing an awesome programming and user environment similar in many ways to OS X and it's predecessor, OpenSTEP. For a long time, there's been an interest using GNUstep to port Mozilla's Camino.app to GNU/Linux and BSD, but since mainstream GCC doesn't support Objective C++, it just isn't possible. And when GNUstep folks do frameworks, they have to use kludges like symbolic links and LD_LIBRARY_PATH settings to make up for the fact that Frameworks aren't supported by mainstream developer tools.

Until this changes, you really need to stick with Apple's tools when building software for OS X.

Steve