[texworks] [MacTeX] Call for Help: Mac builds

[Stefan Löffler]

On 2011-02-16 08:44, Bruno Voisin wrote:
> Le 15 févr. 2011 à 22:38, Joseph Wright a écrit :
>> 3) What to do about universal binaries
> Several problems arise:
>
> - You need to relaunch the Xcode installer and select an option to install the 10.4 SDK, if the plan is to provide a version running on Tiger. I don't remember how the option is spelled out.

I think, for the time being, it is OK to put 10.4 support on hold, as it
was last updated 3.5 years ago (according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_os_x). The oldest Ubuntu release that
is still supported is less than 3 years old, and support for it will be
dropped soon. So, I'd say our first priority is to get 10.5 and 10.6 up
and running well, and then we could investigate other, more complicated
alternatives.
Then again, I have no knowledge which of the Mac OS X versions are still
used heavily - if 10.4 is still a de-facto standard, let me know :).

> - You need to have access to Macs allowing 32- and 64-bit builds. I don't remember if the plan is to provide PPC builds; if this is the case, you need a PPC Mac.

Ideally, I'd like to have all four 32/64 intel and 32/64 ppc builds. But
everyone should focus on what he has available right now - we can worry
about finding a proper computer to compile on once we have a
well-working step-by-step walkthrough.

> - Jonathan mentioned "passing appropriate configure options or setting environment variables", such that the builds are universal, and Adam Maxwell on the MacTeX list was more specific: "you'll have to build the libraries for all architectures, then lipo them together (or take a chance and use the -arch option to gcc with multiple architectures)". This is far, far, far from trivial.

At least Qt supports universal builds through a "-universal" flag,
AFAIK. The only problem then will be to produce universal builds of the
other libraries, like poppler, hunspell, or freetype.

> I must say I feel right now pretty pessimistic about the future of TeXworks on the Mac. With TeXShop already there, the motivation is not that high. Besides, I haven't used TeXworks myself in a very long time (lack of printing being a no-go as far as I'm concerned). Plus, most of the communication on the TeXworks list revolves around scripting, in which I'm not really interested, and otherwise to revolve around Windows issues, with a very active Windows user community.

Well, bring up a different topic ;). But seriously: scripting has been
an important point lately, and will be the main new feature in 0.4. Once
that is out, we can expect that the focus of development will move
elsewhere. As for the Windows community: I just think that there are
more problems there than on the Mac. If everything works smoothly, and
there are no new builds for testing, things are bound to be quiet.
So, overall, I don't see the future of Tw on the Mac as darkly as you.
Maybe it won't be the primary TeX editor, maybe there will be more
issues on other OSs, but still it's an alternative to TeXshop, and
unlike that latter (AFAIK) it is cross-platform, which some people
appreciate.

HTH
Stefan