readline is erroneously marked as not being able to install +universal

[jordanhubbard (Jordan Hubbard)]

root@mighty-> port install emacs
--->  Computing dependencies for emacs
Error: Cannot install gdbm for the archs 'arm64 x86_64' because
Error: its dependency readline cannot build for the required archs.
Error: Follow https://guide.macports.org/#project.tickets to report a bug.

I have, however, built readline just fine as an arm64 library, so I'm not sure where it is flagged as unbuildable for this arch combination (I also looked at the readline/Portfile and I don't see any limitations flagged there). Not sure what's up with this, but as readline is a very key leaf port, it is probably worth fixing.

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

If you're building on an Intel system, the problem is

merger_must_run_binaries yes

It would work on an arm system since that can run x86_64 code.

[kencu (Ken)]

well, I just took out the merger_must_run_binaries yes line, and built it on a BigSur Intel machine:

sudo port -v -s install readline +universal

and got:

% port -v installed readline               
The following ports are currently installed:
  readline @8.1.000_0+universal (active) platform='darwin 20' archs='arm64 x86_64' date='2021-02-08T16:50:59-0800'

and

% file /opt/local/lib/libreadline.8.1.dylib
/opt/local/lib/libreadline.8.1.dylib: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library x86_64] [arm64:Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library arm64]
/opt/local/lib/libreadline.8.1.dylib (for architecture x86_64):	Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library x86_64
/opt/local/lib/libreadline.8.1.dylib (for architecture arm64):	Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library arm64

So -- I'm not sure about when this was actually broken, or what might have changed since then, but it all works now, it seems.

I'm not inclined at present to see what happens on a 10.5 PPC machine, as nothing realistically builds ppc/i386 on a PPC Leopard system anyway at present.

But if somebody really, really, really cares, then they can work on fixing that system.

[kencu (Ken)]

​https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/9967

[kencu (Ken)]

​https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/9967/commits/5ac98930aedf5045df4f33149cf6bc4c88358d20

[kencu (Ken)]

so with this, and a few other minor tweaks, we can now build at least all the way up to xorg-server as +universal on BigSur Intel.

That is getting there.