[OS X TeX] Mactex and PowerPC processors

Richard Koch koch at uoregon.edu
Mon May 2 13:13:59 EDT 2016


Tom,

Thanks for the information, which is news to me, particularly since nobody from 2013 on has
complained about this.

I actually compile that code on a PowerPC machine. Maybe either I or you have non-standard X11.

The main reason I still distribute the package is that users with old machines will otherwise
lose support for tlmgr and thus have to manually update packages. On the other hand,
several people including contributors to MacTeX would like to see PowerPC code vanish.

This is probably a change for next year.

But VERY useful report. You could be the only one who has tried to run
this code, since I’ll confess that I installed it and checked it on Leopard Intel,
but not on Leopard PPC.

Dick Koch


> On May 2, 2016, at 10:04 AM, tkiffe <tkiffe at math.tamu.edu> wrote:
> 
> I tried running the pretest version of mactex 2016 on an iMac with a PowerPC processor with OS X 10.5.6. Dvips crashed immediately with a segmentation fault and xdvi immediately quit, complaining that the libX11 library did not have the appropriate code. I didn’t do any further testing with mactex 2016 but I did go back to previous versions of mactex and had the same crashes with the 2013, 2014, and 2015 mactex distributions. I didn’t go back further than 2013.
> 
> There were no problems with the pretest 2016 on an iMac with an intel processor running 10.5.6.
> 
> Out of curiosity I tried building the 2015 texlive binaries from the texlive sources on the PowerPC iMac and immediately ran into serious compilation errors with the gmp library, xetex, etc.Perhaps it is time to drop support for PowerPC processors. I think the last Macs with PowerPC processors were built in 2006
> or 2007
> 
> Tom
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