Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] Mac OS 10.4 build?
From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2008 17:20:20 -0700

On Oct 9, 2008, at 8:46 AM, Stephen Fisher wrote:

As you may already know, either a PPC or an Intel machine can generate
universal binaries that work on both PPC and Intel. One of the reasons
we're not generating universal binaries is that some of our supporting
libraries (such as GLib IIRC) do byte order checks when compiling, so
the byte order would be hard coded according to the type of system
compiling the universal binary (recall that PPC is big-endian and Intel
is little-endian).

...unless all the configuration tests in the configure script are built with "-arch ppc" on the (Intel-based) buildbot.

Unfortunately, whilst you can build GLib and GTK+ *libraries* that are fat, you can't build fat *header files*, so you can't install a fat "developer's version" of GLib or GTK+ - you'd have to install the PPC and Intel GLibs, or, at least, their header files, in different directories, and build against the two different versions separately.

It's probably possible to build a fat version of Wireshark, but it appears to be far from easy (short of having two buildbots, building the PPC version on the PPC buildbot and the x86 version on the x86 buildbot, and then having the last stage wait for both buildbots to finish and then gluing the binaries together with the lipo command).