Tigerports.com - Entire MacPorts Infrastructure Revived For Mac OS X 10.4

[alex_free]

http://tigerports.com

Imagine if tiger was still supported by MacPorts, thats exactly the experience this provides.

Tigerports is not just a fork of MacPorts. It is a recreation of the entire MacPorts infrastructure that is tailored to our favorite OS. TigerPorts provides:

Tiger orientated ports tree focused on software that works on Tiger.

Tiger orientated base, configured in source to use tigerports.com.

Tiger orientated infrastructure, allows hosting tigerports.com on a Debian VPS rather then a Mac like MacPorts has it. This includes numerous improvements to the sync scripts, adds binary package signing management, and includes a setup script to recreate my server.

Tarball releases to install TigerPorts from source on your Mac, same as official MacPorts (PKG installer is WIP).

The tigerports.com rsync server, which syncs with the Tiger orientated ports tree every 15 minutes, exactly like real MacPorts. Any pull requests merged there will be available in no later then a quarter hour to all TigerPorts users via sudo port selfupdate.

The tigerports.com http server, which serves distfiles.

Security is kept the same, just not managed by MacPorts. The ports tree, portindex, and binary packages served directly by tigerports.com are all signed.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

BINARY PACKAGES
TigerPorts is designed to NOT delete compiled binary packages by default (you can of course change this by editing /opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf and changingportclean notoportclean yes, or you can just periodically runsudo port clean). As you use TigerPorts (unless you change macports.conf as explained previously explained), you will keep a cache of compiled software binaries at/opt/local/var/macports/software. You will also get the distfiles (sources used to build) populated at/opt/local/var/macports/distfiles`. The goal is for all of these to populated on the tigerports.com server, so please submit these 2 folders to me if the software is not yet available as binaries on the tigerports.com server so others can skip building from source!

PORTS TREE
As of the initial release, the source tree is essentially what the official MacPorts one was on 1/31/2025, right before Tiger support was officially dropped. This provides us with a base that we can work on and improve.

There are many community fixes, projects like PPCPorts, etc that I want implemented! Please, open a pull request with your improvements!

I am also OK with downgrading/upgrading individual ports as needed. Have a need for a newer version, or fixes for a new port? Submit it! Notice something is currently impossible to build at the current version, but an older one works? Submit it! I last used macports on Tiger extensively in 2021 and a ton of ports worked. I’m fine reverting to those port files on a case by case basis if its tested to work with the rest of the tree.

BE A USER
Spread the word! Tiger will never die. Report issues, suggest improvements, enjoy it.

Greetz @kencu @barracuda156 @Forest Expertise

 

[kencu]

Just fantastic Alex.

I had pondered something similar, but decided against doing it as my heart is not in Tiger any more.

I did have some fixes for Tiger put together, which I have shared here for you:

GitHub - kencu/TigerPorts

Contribute to kencu/TigerPorts development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Once you've culled anything out of there that seems at all useful to you, please let me know and I'll delete that repo to avoid any confusion.

Very glad to see you take it all over!

 

[kencu]

You never know -- I still have machines that run Tiger, and it's not impossible that I could contribute something again.

Getting this going and available for use as a compiler for Tiger PPC would be pretty fabulous:

GitHub - cellularmitosis/llvm-darwin8-ppc: A self-hosted clang 7.1.1 toolchain for PowerPC Macs on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (G3/G4/G5). C, C++, Objective-C all working. Built on Iain Sandoe's LLVM-7-branch foundation.

A self-hosted clang 7.1.1 toolchain for PowerPC Macs on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (G3/G4/G5). C, C++, Objective-C all working. Built on Iain Sandoe's LLVM-7-branch foundation. - cellularmitosis/llvm-...

github.com

 

[Andrew-R]

Just fantastic Alex.

I had pondered something similar, but decided against doing it as my heart is not in Tiger any more.

I did have some fixes for Tiger put together, which I have shared here for you:

GitHub - kencu/TigerPorts

Contribute to kencu/TigerPorts development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Once you've culled anything out of there that seems at all useful to you, please let me know and I'll delete that repo to avoid any confusion.

Very glad to see you take it all over!

In general I prefer to keep old stuff around, it does not cost us fortune to keep things on github . (While AI definitely trained on it).

For humans you can add line in Readme "use upstream here instead".

Rationale/rationalization: sometimes stuff not useful for 10-20 years just spark someone's interest again. Thinking in general takes time ....

 

[alex_free]

Just fantastic Alex.

I had pondered something similar, but decided against doing it as my heart is not in Tiger any more.

I did have some fixes for Tiger put together, which I have shared here for you:

GitHub - kencu/TigerPorts

Contribute to kencu/TigerPorts development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Once you've culled anything out of there that seems at all useful to you, please let me know and I'll delete that repo to avoid any confusion.

Very glad to see you take it all over!

In 2021 I used your tigerports-repo overlay to compile Super Mario 64 EX (decompilation to native i386/ppc mac os x port) for tiger/leopard as well as half-life 1 for intel tiger (now yall have half-life 2 for tiger ppc haha). That was the first time anyone did a n64 port to ppc/tiger, and the first time half-life 1 was available without needing steam (required leopard/intel even back when that OS was current). I check occasionally and that person who totally isn't me that uploaded sm64ex tiger/leopard ppc builds to archive.org are still there!

You inspired all this! You carried tiger way longer then it ever should have. I compiled MINGW-W64 toolchain on PPC TIGER in 2021! Believe it or not sm64ex needs that on even the current MacOS (too much to explain why but trust me on it).

 

[Smithwick’s]

Howdy Alex! I was just setting this up on my PBG4 and found that the tarball on your website led to a 404, couldn't find the logical location of where it might be hiding by poking around elsewhere in the folders.

 

[alex_free]

Howdy Alex! I was just setting this up on my PBG4 and found that the tarball on your website led to a 404, couldn't find the logical location of where it might be hiding by poking around elsewhere in the folders.

Oh wow, the gz download is down. The bz2 works, I’ll fix that thanks

 

[alex_free]

@Smithwick’s back up, thanks for the report. There’s gonna be more PowerPC binaries up soon, but I just started building them with my new G5 (currently a lot of Intel stuff is up already, power stuff is working just needs to be built from source right now).

 

[Nightphase]

Can this be integrated with an existing install of MacPorts 2.10.7? I have two installs of MP on Tiger with fairly updated ports (June/July) on both my MDD and PBG4.

 

[alex_free]

Can this be integrated with an existing install of MacPorts 2.10.7? I have two installs of MP on Tiger with fairly updated ports (June/July) on both my MDD and PBG4.

You could download the release and build it to 'upgrade' into tigerports. Once you do you won't loose any installed ports, but you will now be using the tigerports tree so there may be updates available.

This closely tracks both ppcports and has some things in it I haven't submitted to ppcports yet (I try to submit everything I fix there), but there is a ton of things working like gcc16, git, curl, python, and more. There's also some fixes for other things related to tiger in the base that your install.

I'm planning on hosting a ton of ppc pre-built ports soon, but alas they are still building on my G5 for now (there is a ton of Intel stuff already up, and more to come there too).

 

[alex_free]

libsdl2-cocoa now builds from source with pulse-audio backend (so latest SDL2+working sound) 🙂