[MacPorts-announce] Prebuilt archives available for Lion

[Joshua Root]

The MacPorts project is pleased to announce that prebuilt archives for
OS X 10.7 Lion are now available for many ports, and will be used
automatically when installing.

This is made possible by the capabilities added in MacPorts 2.0 and
noted in the release announcement [1]. Many users will have noticed that
archives started becoming available for Snow Leopard last year; these
were produced by a pilot build server. A Lion build server was added
recently, and as of yesterday, it finished attempting to build all
available ports and placed the resulting archives on the download server.

A prebuilt archive cannot always be used, for a number of reasons:
 * Our archives are built only for the default prefix (/opt/local), so
   if MacPorts is installed in a custom prefix, it will not download
   them.
 * We only build archives for the default variants of each port.
 * Many ports do not yet list license information.
 * Some ports have a license that does not allow for distribution of
   binaries, or have a license that conflicts with the license of a
   dependency in a way that prevents such distribution.

Use of prebuilt archives can be disabled by using the -s option, as
described in the port(1) man page. The upcoming 2.1.0 release includes a
macports.conf setting that allows choosing this permanently.

- Josh

[1]
<http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-announce/2011-July/000014.html>