Release 1.5 branch created

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

On Jul 4, 2007, at 7:07 PM, Anders F Björklund wrote:

> Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:
>
>> 	Thanks for the pointers Blair! It took me a little while to  
>> realize I actually needed to commit the init action before  
>> starting my merge activity, but after that it was all smooth from  
>> there! My commit logs should illustrate what I merged and what I  
>> left out of the branch.... so anyone interested in having or  
>> pulling something, please do inspect the commit logs and feel free  
>> to scream at me ;-) (I realize I left out the FreeBSD support  
>> commits, but I'm figuring Anders will want that in? are they  
>> stable enough to be merged at this point in the game?).
>
> Depends on if you want FreeBSD to still work or not ?
> Just seems strange to leave it in the "undead" state,
> either it's revived again or it's properly buried :-)


	The only reason why FreeBSD support was "left behind", as opposed to  
flat out pulled, is that at the time no one seemed to be using  
(Darwin)MacPorts on any platform other than Mac OS X (not even on  
[pure | open]Darwin), which seems logical to me as most other  
platforms already have their own packaging tools/ports trees best  
suited for them. So the question was: why should we be putting <some  
amount> of energy into supporting scenarios (MacPorts on another  
platforms) that not only will have a very limited audience, but also  
that people are likely to choose against? (seems logical to me that  
they'd choose their own platform's packaging system/ports tree).

	So the support was "left behind" due to a sort of generalized lack  
of interest. But it was not "voted against", we never deemed it as  
something we would be fundamentally opposed to, as long as there's  
someone interested enough in the support to provide it him/her- 
self... like you have in this case ;-) What we did agree on was,  
seeing MacPorts on other platforms was almost not a real life thing,  
that on refocusing solely on Mac OS X we would not stop ourselves  
from using whatever Mac OS X specific technologies we could get our  
hands on to improve MacPorts just for the sake of keeping it  
portable... just to safeguard a portability that practically no one  
was leveraging in real life (again, with good reason in my opinion)  
and possibly miss out on pretty cool things Mac OS X has to offer.  
The inclusion of the tcl-objc bridge is an example of this.... but,  
again, there's no fundamental opposition to portability, I believe.  
So if someone interested enough, like you ;-), comes along to hook up  
the bridge with GNUStep to make i work on other than Mac OS X, then  
big woot for that!

	As team manager, I have no opposition to merging this set of changes  
into the release_1_5 branch and shipping MacPorts 1.5 with FreeBSD  
support again, as long as the code is stable and doesn't cause any  
failures/regressions on Mac OS X, our by far main focus (cf. my  
previous question on stability).

>
> If it's just crazy old me, I can patch in here locally.
> I'm not a die-hard FreeBSD fan, I just find the whole
> Mac lock-in part a bit scary and want to stay portable...


	I understand portability and love it and embrace it (this is ports  
tree of open source software after all, and I dedicate quite a bit of  
time to it ;-), so I understand your concern. But in this particular  
case I do have to ask: what does portability buy not only the  
MacPorts project... but MacPorts users themselves? Are they really  
gonna fire up a FreeBSD box, remove its native (and much larger)  
ports tree and use MacPorts? I guess I just don't understand the  
motivation for that (maybe I haven't used FreeBSD's ports tree  
enough, if you know what I mean ;-). But if there is an audience out  
there wanting to do exactly that, then by all means! Still, however,  
Mac OS X is by far our main focus and I want to safeguard that. So I  
guess I could simply sum-up my position as follows: "whatever you  
want, as long as it doesn't hurt our Mac OS X focus in any way....  
and also as long as it's not crack smoking!" ;-) And that goes for  
other platforms too, not just FreeBSD (someone using MacPorts on  
Linux? ;-)

	So, now to everybody.... any objections to merging FreeBSD support  
into release_1_5? James and Markus? You cool? going once.... going  
twice.... ;-)

>
> With OpenDarwin gone, it looked like the easiest target.
> If you do want the FreeBSD platform, I have some patches
> to the dozen or so ports needed to install the RPM port.


	Please, be my guest, by all means do commit!

>
> --anders
>
> PS. You do want to bring this one over, though: (it's a bug)
> http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/ticket/12168
> Without it, *everything* will link to Foundation framework.


	Landon made three commits that I've been reviewing this evening, the  
one addressing this bug was the first. If FreeBSD support does go  
into 1.5 this one will certainly be included.

	Thanks for your dedication to extending MacPorts feature set (and  
sorry for removing the autoconf tclsh tests & checks in my branch ;-)  
Regards,...


-jmpp