Can I use Macports for Gimp maintenance?

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi Lukas,


Lukas Oberhuber wrote:
> I'm the Macos maintainer/packager for Gimp and one of the problems I
> have is keeping all the packages up to date, and then packaging them
> for distribution as a simple installer.

a bittle late in reply, but... I have some experience. I have gotten
last year GIMP working on Quartz all way back to 10.5 32bit on +quartz,
with some minor caveats. 10.7 used to work "out of the box" except one
minor patch.

So, the answer to ho have all necessary quartz dependencies is yes. The
same goes for support of even very old Macs.
My final goal would be to have it running on PPC! but some of the many
dependencies are a hard nut.

What I have never been able to have sucessfully is co-existence of
quartz and x11 (not that I am interested in the latter, which I use on
BSD, but it helps pinpointing bugs and build issues) and "several"
versions together. So in my pursue to work on these old macs, I just got
myself a second laptop. I already had gotten this for another laptop.

What is incovenient - espacially for support of "old" and "very new" is
the way upgrades in MacPorts work. You quickly upgrade all dependencies
out of the box, most often it works. But if you have an issue because
any of the dependencies, then it is not easy to get back that.

Suppose my status right now: I upgraded everything on my 10.7 box, GIMP
compiles, but does not work properly. Where is the issue? I don't know,
probably an issue within GTK or another dependency. If I were to release
an installable package, I'd be stuck. It is cumbersome to "revert" one
single dependency. The best way is to have a second "overlay" repository.
I suppose that if you package, you want "current stuff" but it is not
mandatory for all dependecies to be latest, but more the latest which is
proven to work.

Riccardo

PS: sharing the patches to get it working is not easy as hoped, buf if
you are interested, I can with you.