[OS X TeX] Threads on MacIntel
Gerben Wierda
Gerben.Wierda at rna.nl
Sat Jun 11 13:39:31 CEST 2005
On Jun 10, 2005, at 17:06, Jonathan Kew wrote:
> On 10 Jun 2005, at 6:59 am, Fernando Pereira wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jun 10, 2005, at 8:14 AM, Bruno Voisin wrote:
>>
>>
>>> "Our initial analysis and prediction of a smooth transition still
>>> appears to be accurate, even after a few days of review and
>>> analysis," Siegel said in an e-mail interview. "There are some
>>> adjustments to be made, but nothing particularly daunting."
>>>
>>
>> Swinging this back to TeX on OS X... The issues are different for TeX
>> (and its command-line support programs) and for front-ends like
>> TexShop. We know that TeX and its companions work fine on x86. The
>> problem will not be with the code itself, but rather with the
>> availability of development tools and systems to create fat binaries
>> for these applications. In particular, it's not clear yet whether fat
>> binaries can be built in a standard command-line *nix way, which is
>> what the build processes for those programs require.
>
> Yes, they can.
>
> However, this isn't really necessary (depending on the overall setup).
> Consider the output of
>
> $ which tex
>
> which, on my machine, responds
>
> /usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current/tex
>
> Note the path. If I were on an Intel Mac, the "powerpc" part would be
> replaced by "i686" or something. So the binaries would be separate
> anyway. The two architectures can co-exist in a single filesystem even
> without universal binaries, by appropriate PATH configuration, etc.
This raises an interesting point. The path
/usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin6.8 tells you on what system
the binaries were *created*, not what they contain.
So, when I make my distribution, most likely the path will be something
like /usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin8.x but the binaries
inside will be fat:
hedwig:~ gerben$ file
/usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current/tex
/usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current/tex: Mach-O fat file
with 2 architectures
/usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current/tex (for architecture
ppc): Mach-O executable ppc
/usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current/tex (for architecture
i386): Mach-O executable i386
G
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