[Jack-Devel] MacOS support

[David Kastrup]

Kjetil Matheussen <k.s.matheussen at gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 10:18 PM, Chris Caudle <chris at chriscaudle.org> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, February 1, 2018 1:24 pm, Stéphane Letz wrote:
>> > I've built JackOSX 0.92_b3 on the now died G5 machine.
>>
>> Then I refer back to my previous message, shipping an old version forever
>> is not sustainable, jackd on Mac users who want support going forward from
>> now need to recruit Mac developers to help, or at least get together and
>> buy a Mac for falktx to use.
>>
>>
> If mac users wants to help, they can do so. The repository seems to
> contain everything that's needed. There's both xcode files, and
> support for darwin in the wscript file.

If Mac users were able to work with XCode files and Darwin support,
they'd be using Linux instead.

MacOSX and Windows are operating systems mainly for terminal users, with
"terminal" being an adjective rather than a noun.  They form a caste
separate from "programmers" and it is the latters' duty to serve the
formers' needs: that's what they are paid for.

Except that with free software, they rarely are getting paid.  On
systems like GNU/Linux the dearth of pay for free software is not
different, but free software is much more common.  As a result, the
social norms around expectations and programming tasks are more
favorable to sticking with a community as a free software programmer.

> If needed, it shouldn't be much work to create new jack releases.

Maybe take a look at GUB <http://www.lilypond.org/gub> ?  Very few of
the active developers of LilyPond have a clue about how it works (and
when it breaks every few years, it tends to be months out of order), but
it does provide binary installers for LilyPond on a number of different
platforms for every single release.  Automatically.  Using humongous
amounts of CPU time (I think first release still takes days when
starting from scratch, but afterwards it's about 6 hours per release on
an 8-processor machine.  To be fair, most of it is compiling the
documentation), but that's more affordable than human time.

Basically, as long as things work, binary installers for Windows and
MacOSX just fall out as part of the release process.

-- 
David Kastrup