In MacPorts, the term "Universal" usually means a compiled program or library which contains object code in multiple instruction sets, so that it can run on a variety of CPUs.
In the history of macOS and MacPorts, three important kinds of "universal" binaries have been:
- x86_64 and arm64 (for macOS 11 and later)
- i386 and x86_64 (for MacOS X Tiger 10.4 through macOS 10.14 Mojave)
- ppc and i386 (for MacOS X Cheetah 10.0 through Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8)
MacPorts offers compilation to universal binaries as a default preference and in response to a +universal variant.
Overview of ports with +universal variants (2007)
This is an overview list of ports with universal variants. Each entry is a link to a separate page which describes the port's behaviour when compiled with +universal. The list and the referenced pages date from 2007, and mention only ppc and i386 architectures. As of 2021, the information is out of date.
am-utils
bison
bool
cksfv
coreutils
cpio
curl
dcfldd
diffutils
expat
findutils
gawk
gettext
gmake
gnutar
grep
groff
gsed
gwhich
gzip
indent
lha
libgpg-error
libiconv
libpng
libspiff
libtool
libxml2
libxslt
m4
mhash
neon
openssl
pcre
raptor
rasqal
scheme48
sgrep2
slang
slrn
srm
tre
treecc
uriparser
yafic
wput
zlib
legend
The pages linked to above use the following codes:
- b=broken
- s=stable (completes the testsuite without errors)
- t=testing (no testsuite available)
- u=undecided (the testsuite fails or doesn't compile, the program seems to work as expected, though)