Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) 32-bit build

Development
1

Hi there,

I am yet another disillusioned BTSync user, looking for an alternative. SyncThing looks very promising and I am going to give it a try. My main computer is an ancient MacBook Pro with an Intel Core Duo running Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6). Unfortunately, this dinosaur has a 32-bit CPU, so the official binary at https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/releases/download/v0.10.26/syncthing-macosx-amd64-v0.10.26.tar.gz won’t work for me. Thank goodness SyncThing is open source and I, despite my noob-ness, managed to build my own SyncThing binary, which seems to work, although I have not thoroughly tested it yet. I figured that there’s possibly more people out there who may be interested in a 32-bit Mac version of SyncThing so I put it online at (link deleted by topic starter because there are now official 32 bit Mac builds).

If, somehow, this post is undesirable in any way, please let me know.

2

I am actually surprised that there is no 32bit builds for solaris and osx. I’ve actually asked @calmh the question why there isn’t any.

3

No-on had asked for them yet. :wink: Every Mac sold after 2006 is 64 bit, so it’s kinda niche. Solaris can probably run on 32 bit, but I doubt anyone does…

I’ll add a 32 bit Mac build, no problem!

4

If anyone needs (free) access to a virtualized / networked OS X instance for development purposes just msg me and I’ll give you root and axs to the hypervisor

5

I don’t, particularly, since these builds are cross compiled from Linux but I’m curious - which Mac OS do you virtualize under what? It’s something that might be neat some day, and I remember looking at it and thinking it seemed cumbersome and hacky. That is, when not running from an actual hardware Mac. I have a bunch of regular x86 boxes running various variants of kvm that could be useful.

6

Thanks @calmh for providing official 32-bit OS X binaries. You are right that this won’t hit the top downloads, but it is certainly nice for many people with an older spare Mac. As for even older Macs: Go doesn’t seem to run on PPC architectures, so running Syncthing on a PPC machine probably won’t ever happen. Too bad, though understandable.

All devvers: thank you for all your great work on Syncthing :smile:

7

I managed to compile Syncthing for PPC, but it involves a lot of cross-compilation outside the go runtime. if there is a need for it, we could release this as well.

8

To me, a PPC binary would be a “nice to have”, certainly no “need”. I have one Powermac G5 that I use occasionally. It’s interesting to see though that there is a pretty active community which keeps the PPC architecture alive (e.g. Lowendmac, Tenfourfox). Also, Dropbox recently announced to drop support for older Macs, which could be a nice opportunity for Syncthing.

How labor intensive is it to (cross) compile a PPC binary?

9

If you could write down the procedure somewhere or point me in the right direction, this may be something we can build a docker image for once and for all and include in the future? I don’t care super much about Mac OS on PPC (seriously, sell that box on eBay and replace it with a raspberry pie for the same money) but there may be NAS:es and stuff that would benefit.

10

Hi!

First off all, I like to congratulate the developers of Syncthing, this amazing software. It helped a lot of people that I know to ditch, BTSync, Dropbox etc… I use in almost all my computers, and it’s a perfect solution!

I did a donation to the project after I installed and used in my computers, and discovered how useful it was! Congrats!

I even presented the software to some of my friends, and helped them to make the move to Syncthing too.

But, today I would like to, if possible, make a wish… I REALLY would love to see, Syncthing support Mac OS on PPC hardware.

I’m part of a community of Mac PPC enthusiasts in Brazil, and we would love to be able to install Syncthing on our PPC Macs. This would give our machines even more extra life!

We do have some updated software like TenFourFox for web browsing, and the possibility of being able to run Syncthing on some of this machines (my G4 for example, is my main File Server) would be amazing!

I do have the latest model of Mac Pro, MacBook Pro and other recent Macs, but my G4 MDD is my file server and my favorite computer… as some other enthusiasts have recent Macs, but cherish their PPC oldies! :slight_smile:

Is there any chance, of seeing this happening?

Thanks, and again, congrats for the awesome software you build!

Cheers from Brazil!

11

We support whatever arch/distro combo Go supports, and it doesn’t look like Go supports PPC for OS X. Given it’s a dead combo, I don’t think it ever will.

12

Maybe I’m wrong but I’ve read the release notes for go 1.5 and 1.6

There are also several new operating system and architecture ports. The more mature new ports are darwin/arm, darwin/arm64 (Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices), and linux/arm64. There is also experimental support for ppc64 and ppc64le (IBM 64-bit PowerPC, big and little endian). https://blog.golang.org/go1.5

and

The implementation of build modes started in Go 1.5 has been expanded to more systems. This release adds support for the c-shared mode on android/386, android/amd64, android/arm64, linux/386, and linux/arm64; for the shared mode on linux/386, linux/arm, linux/amd64, and linux/ppc64le; and for the new pie mode (generating position-independent executables) on android/386, android/amd64, android/arm, android/arm64, linux/386, linux/amd64, linux/arm, linux/arm64, and linux/ppc64le. See the design document for details. https://golang.org/doc/go1.6

(missed the 32bit, sry)

13

Yet none of them are darwin/ppc

14

In case anyone is interested, here’s a 32-bit Mac OS X binary that is working on my Snow Leopard 10.6 MBP: http://www.sparsio.eu/syncthing-macosx-386-v0.13.4.zip
Cheers

15

Did you do anything in particular to build it other than the obvious? I wonder if binaries built for 386 on our default Mac build server would work. If so I could resurrect the build for it.

I killed it a while back since there are “no” 386 Mac OS users any more, but when looking at the usage stats there are actually 0.1% of them. That’s not many, granted, but it’s about as many as there are FreeBSD-386 or Solaris users (and much more than NetBSD or Dragonfly!), so why not.

16

In particular, does this build work on 10.6? It’s built on 10.8 but statically linked so I would hope that it does…

https://build.syncthing.net/job/syncthing-pr-mac/953/artifact/

17

Thanks @calmh! The binary you posted works for me. A revival of the official 32-bit Mac binary would be welcome to me, as long as this doesn’t require too much effort. :grin:

18

Almost none. I’ll revive it, then.

19

v0.13.5 is out, with a macosx-386 build.

20

Great, thanks!