[OS X TeX] Threads on MacIntel

[Gerben Wierda]

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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