[tex-live] tlmgr invokes cc on OS X

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 8:17 AM, Norbert Preining wrote:
>
>> > If there is a different and save way to get the platform name on
>> > Apple, let me know. We trued a lot of different things, but none
>> > of them worked on all supported archs/os combinations.
>>
>> Not a portable way. Using sysctl might give what you're looking for
>
> I remember that Mojca tried a lot, but it never gave enough
> information.
>
> I guess we have to add more and more exceptions to have config.guess
> not run for Mac...

What exactly would you like to know and what exactly is the problem
(other than config.guess trying to invoke the compiler)? Karl did make
some changes for TL 2013 (to make x86_64 default rather than using
ppc+i386 everywhere) that actually made me happy and I wasn't aware of
any missing information. I can try to provide whatever you are
missing.

Invoking the compiler is potentially problematic also on other
platforms (mipsel is the first one that comes to mind), but I didn't
notice earlier (or maybe forgot) that config.guess always tried to
call the compiler. I was aware that compiler is being invoked on some
linux architectures to distinguish between 32-bit and 64-bit. I
requested some upstream modifications of config.guess for better and
more reliable detection on both Mac and mipsel, but the authors
refused to change anything (with some arguments I didn't agree with,
but it would be pointless to argue).

If Karl agrees, if it is easy to do and if invoking the compiler makes
problems on newer OSes (I didn't install 10.9 yet), I definitely
support the idea to avoid calling config.guess on Macs. The
config.guess script doesn't return anything useful on Mac anyway, so
it's already useless. I would just never dare to propose that change
myself if it wasn't for the reported problems. I suspect that most
developers (you, Karl, ...) would ask why Mac needed any special
handling in the first place and why it couldn't be treated the same
way as any other non-windows platform. (At the end we'll end up
writing TeX Live's own version of config.guess anyway, I guess.)

Mojca