Mac OS/X Port data Model

[Gary Meyer]

On Jan 11, 2011, at 12:00 PM, Henri Gomez wrote:

>> I hope I'm answering your question here.  What Mike checked in is the ability to build universal binaries, which means both 32 bit and 64 bit binaries are built at the same time.  Mac OS X has the ability to make binaries (both executables, and object files, etc) with multiple "slices", meaning you can combine a 32 bot binary with a 64 bit binary into one Universal binary.  If I'm interpretting your question correctly, there is nothing that needs to be done to build both slices.
> 
> Hi Gary, that's exactly what I seen from the first build.
> 
> I built it on an iMac with 64bits kernel (x86_64), should I expect
> problems if I try to build with a box on 32bits kernel ?

No it should build fine on any machine

> 
> Universal apply to x86 architecture, did PPC will be supported also ?

PPC is supported when building universally.  At Apple, we build many things "3-way Fat" meaning i386, x86_64, ppc.  (By the way ppc refers to 32-Bit PPC, ppc64 refers to 64-Bit PPC)
So it is possible to build something 3-way fat, however "as of this instant in time" the MacOSX-port is only 2-way fat (i386, x86_64).  Apple no longer supports PPC, so you probably won't see any Apple engineers supporting PPC, however if you want to support PPC, you can do so.  I believe our stance is we won't stop anyone else from supporting PPC, and we will do our best to make it possible for PPC to be supported, but we (Apple engineers) won't do any direct support for PPC.

So today, PPC is not supported by the code, but we won't stand in your way if you want to support it (and it is fully possible to support it).

> 
> Thanks guys, I will follow the project step by step, my Hudson Build
> system is allready setup for continuous builds.


Gary.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gary Meyer
Java Software Build Engineer
gary.meyer at apple.com