Prevent stripping Universal Binaries?

I wouldn't have thought it would strip any code from third party apps, but can't say yes or no as this is the first I've heard, but if I look at my apps via about this mac, it still shows them as intel and universal, surely if it was stripping code as you suggest they would all be listed as intel.


That got me curious, and can now say no code is stripped from third party apps, I dragged an app listed as universal from SL machine to a PPC running Leopard and it worked without any problems

Message was edited by: kdb1

No, it does not strip code out of any apps... if it did, my copy of MS Office 2004 would be trashed, but it isn't.

Perhaps it didn't happen on your Mac, but it certainly did on mine. In fact that's how Snow Leopard "saves" so much space on your drive. At first I thought Apple would only do that to their own apps, but when I upgraded my 3 year old 32-bit Intel Core Duo MacBook Pro 15" from 10.5.8 to SL, I discovered that all of the UB apps on my main drive had been stripped of the PPC code, displaying "Intel application" whenever I did a "Get Info" on the apps... and the apps were about 1/2 their normal size.

Perhaps this only happens on 32-bit Macs (I haven't been able to determine whether this is true), but it really caused me problems...

Richard Gaskin wrote:
I understand that Snow Leopard runs on Intel only, and accordingly has no Universal Binary apps in its install. But from what I've read it seems it also strips the PPC portion of all third-party UBs during installation as well -- is that correct?

no. SL does not strip any universal binaries from anything. whatever gave you that idea?

If so, does the installer provide a way to prevent it from stripping third-party apps?

I don't have Rosetta installed, and although I don't have a lot of third party applications, all of them remained universal after a fresh install.

I have Rosetta installed & the Snow Leopard installer did not strip any binaries from any app. In fact, I have had to go back & recompile several Applescripts I saved as applications that were still PPC only because I originally wrote them on a PPC Mac.

AFAIK, there is nothing in the Snow Leopard installer or the OS itself that would do this. Of course, it does replace almost all of the bundled Apple apps with new Intel-only versions & it will move certain third party apps to the "Incompatible Applications" folder, but that is all it does. There is no evidence from the installer log or an examination of the installer scripts that does anything else in this respect.

I suspect the other user was mistaken about what caused the binaries to be stripped of any code, or has discovered a bug so rare that only a very few users are affected by it out of the millions that have upgraded to Snow Leopard.

Nonsense! I hate to be so rudely absolute there, but that really is nonsense.

SL saves space because it does not include any PPC code. That means that all Apple applications are replaced by versions that are smaller and run on Intel only. However, it absolutely does not modify third-party applications. If it did, you would have heard quite an uproar here a couple months ago, yet I heard no such thing. This is the first report I've heard making such claims.

I suspect that you have done something else to your system without realizing it, such as using Monolingual to remove unused languages and unwittingly setting it to strip the PPC code from your apps (which it will also do).

Thomas, thank you for pointing that out to me... I had used Monolingual a week or so before upgrading to SL and didn't realize that clicking the "Remove" button would execute was was in all THREE tabs instead of just the first one. I used it to strip out extra languages to clear out space for installing SL, and it must have stripped the PPC code at the same time...

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