Mac OS X cross-compiler coming soon to a Fedora near you (or maybe not?)

[Erik van Pienbroek]

Op donderdag 18-06-2009 om 12:43 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef Richard
W.M. Jones:
> does cctools now have real 64 bit support (ie. are they
> trying to make the code 64 bit clean -- previously we had to compile
> the whole thing with -m32)?

x86_64 support is one of the major features in the latest Mac OS X (Snow
Leopard) so I guess things have improved in that area. However, when
trying to build the odcctools on my x86_64 laptop a compile error
occurred. Help is appreciated to get the odcctools operational for
x86_64 Linux hosts. Support for x86_64 targets should be the next step.

> > - Support for fat/universal binaries
> >     This requires multiple GCC compilers which are tied together by
> >     a small wrapper. This wrapper (which is called /usr/bin/gcc on
> >     regular Mac OS X environments) accepts arguments like 
> >     '-arch i386 -arch ppc' and calls the corresponding compilers
> >     and uses lipo to merge the results together
> 
> What do we lose if we just build everything for, say, i386?  PPC Macs
> are a bit long in the tooth now aren't they?

Support for ppc environments could be dropped as only Intel-based
Macintosh'es were fabricated and sold in the last few years. However,
fat/universal binaries are still used nowadays containing i386 and
x86_64 binaries. I think we should aim for those two targets.

> >     - Can we regenerate the .dylib files which are bundled with the SDK
> >       from source code (which is a requirement for Fedora) so that we
> >       get something like w32api?
> 
> My thought for this one is can we rebuild these files just from a
> table of the exported symbols?  (ie. nm *.dylib)

Would that be legal enough? I've heard rumors on several places that
such acts are considered 'reverse engineering' which isn't
allowed/questionable. The only way to create something like this in a
fully legal way would be by using the public Apple documentation.

> > - End user installers
> >     We need something like nsiswrapper for Mac OS X environments.
> >     On Mac OS X environments, all applications are bundled in one
> >     directory, a so called '.app'. This directory contains some
> >     standard files (containing application information, an icon, etc)
> >     and of course the application itself along with it's dependencies
> >     and data files. These .app folders can be packed in a .zip file
> >     or a .dmg file which end-users can open directly to run/install
> >     the application
> 
> Doesn't odcctools provide something to do this?

Not that I'm aware of. The odcctools only provide a set of tools which
offer the same kind of functionality as with binutils for Linux
environments (linker, assembler, etc).

Regards,

Erik van Pienbroek