[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] Tux4kids apps on MacPorts

[David Bruce]

Hi,

I've been working again on the macports builds of tuxmath and tuxtype
for the last few days. The good news is that all of the libs we need
now have working universal builds, including SDL_Pango.  The portfile
for tuxmath is now updated to version 1.7.1 and has been committed by
the macports folks (I'm not a macports committer), so anyone with
macports is current.

I also have a portfile for tuxtype on my machine, which I have not yet
sent in.  It turns out that the data path bug in tuxtype which Luc
detected is also important here.  It's fixed in svn, but we (I) need
to post a *tar.gz with the fix in it before macports can use it.
There is also a problem with wchar_t to UTF-8 conversion that needs to
be fixed to get the new phrase typing activity to work on the Mac.
Anyway, tuxtype will also be in macports once these things are taken
care of.

One cool thing about macports is that i386, ppc, and universal builds
can all be made very simply from the same machine, albeit with a
pitfall or two.  Macports also has automated commands (kind of like
make targets) to create pkg or dmg files, either just for the package
itself (e.g. "sudo port dmg tuxmath") or for the package with all of
its macports dependencies ("sudo port mdmg tuxmath").  The latter is
recommended for portable installation but is really big.  I don't yet
know if dependencies can be included more selectively, or if so,
whether there would be linking problems.

There also is an apparently important limitation on the macports dmg
files - they are specific to the OS-X version for which they were
built (e.g 10.4 or 10.5), at least without additional hacking.  So,
I'm not yet sure that this will be the best way to make dmg files for
end users.  At any rate, wherever we post the mac builds, I think we
should suggest to users that package management with macports is
better than dealing with individual dmg files by hand.

Cheers,

David