[tlbuild] Cross-compiling TL on Mac for Tiger

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hello Dick,

Since you announced that your new binaries will only be available for
Leopard this year, I was thinking a bit about the following.

For ConTeXt minimals & consequently TLContrib we've been successfully
cross-compiling binaries for Tiger and all the available architectures
since 2008 and apart from some tiny troubles every now and then (which
required tiny fixes in source code or a bit more of my own expertise
to add some additional flags and where to add them when switching from
one OS to the new one), we never had any major problems or any user
complaining that it stopped working for him/her. And we still have
quite some PPC & Tiger users.

A while ago I tried to cross-compile TL, but I had no idea how to do
that. Now I created a one-line fix in Build script and the
cross-compilation went through without any problem, including a
succesfully built XeTeX (the last time I tried, which might be quite
some time ago, it didn't compile on my machine at all). Now I have a
folder with i386 binaries compiled on x86_64 architecture, and I'm
almost sure that compiling for ppc and adding additional setting:
    MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.4
    LDFLAGS="-L/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/lib"
(or whatever OS version needs to be supported) should be able to build
the binaries that will work on Tiger. Maybe tiny bits might need to be
fixed, but apparently not much if anything at all. As a bonus you
won't have to keep ancient machines and OSes lying around just for the
sake of being able to provide binaries for other Mac users.

Of course somebody on Tiger should test if such binaries work fine. I
can only volunteer to test on Lion, but the last time I tried there
were no problems. If you have a working version of Leopard you could
even compile for 10.3, but maybe it is the time now to leave Panther
rest in peace (the decision is yours), while Tiger is still not
entirely extinct species.

In any case I would at least vote for adding a few if-clauses to Build
script of TeX Live to enable easier cross-compiling on Mac (even if
you decide to build natively).

What do you think?

Mojca

PS: My humble request: would it be possible not to force users to
download i386/ppc binaries during MacTeX 2011 updates?