Hi everyone,
Did those of you with a Tiger installation on an Intel Mac have issues compiling M4 with latest MacPorts?
I did. And the only fix on the web so far is for Power PC users, it seems.

Here’s a little workaround I tried:
Long story short, you can edit the Portfile of M4 and change version from 1.4.20 to 1.4.17.
After this, run sudo port install m4 checksum.skip=yes

How to edit the file:
Choose "Go to" and then„Go to folder“ in Finder.
Go to /opt/local/var/macports and go further down the directory structure.
More precisely, we want to go to /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/macports/release/tarballs/ports/devel/m4

Copy the Portfile to desktop, edit with your text editor, save it and then move it back.
Tiger now asks you for abort or permission. Choose Permission, enter password.

Then run the command mentioned above (sudo port install m4 checksum.skip=yes).
If something fails, you can try sudo port clean m4 and run it again.

Edit: I forgot to mention, if you're on PPC platform, you may need to have these patches:
https://github.com/mechanicjay/ppc-tiger-localports

Best wishes,
Jo22

PS: An even simpler workaround is to simply start with an older version of MacPorts first and do not update the tarballs (do not perform a selfupdate yet).
Such as the installer DMG for MacPorts 2.9.3 (as an example, it's from 2024 I think) - it's just a guess, though. You can try an older version first, too.
Then go install m4, curl, python310, bash, apple-gcc42 +bootstrap (or was it apple-gcc40 +bootstrap) first and so on.
Once the basic utilities are installed, updating is much easier. If you have to update in first place, I mean.

By the way, in general, gimp2 is a rather large application with lots of dependencies (sudo port install gimp2).
If you get it to install, most libraries are finding the way on your installation.
Not sure if Gimp2 can be installed on old Tiger, though. I've just noticed it on an Mx Mac.

PS2: If you're having issues compiling apple-gcc42, please don't blame yourself too much.
MacPorts seems to be kinda broken for Tiger right now.
The build bots for PPC are nolonger online, as well or so it seems.

As an alternative to regular MacPorts, you can try using inofficial PPC forks of MacPorts or use tigerbrew or use tiger.sh
(has pre-built binaries of many cool applications such as neofetch; just tested it on a Power Mac G4).

While they're meant for PPC users, there's some chance that i386 Tiger can run them as universal applications or through Rosetta emulation.
(Once apple-gcc42 works on the Mac, many applications can be compiled from scratch using MacPorts and similar.)

Last but not least, there's also an "MacPorts 2.10.7 (2025) for Tiger and Leopard with Gcc++ 10" package floating around.
Haven't had any experience with it, though.

Some helpful links (hopefully):
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/leopard- … ger-sh.2379622/

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/binary-m … owerpc.2271615/

Good luck! 🙂🤞