Release 1.5 branch created

[James Berry]

On Jul 5, 2007, at 12:12 AM, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:

>> 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.... ;-)

I don't have any problems with some relatively minor patches required  
to support use of MacPorts in other environments, such as FreeBSD. A  
couple of points though:

  - I might change my mind of the extent of such patches began to  
impact the maintainability of the MacPorts base code.

  - There may be times when some of the things we do to MacPorts may  
not be easily supportable on other OS's. One example being that I'd  
like to make a bunch of new changes to Startupitem support sometime  
around the leopard release (when we can finally _assume_ launchd  
support) that may not be so easy to replicate on other OS's. Given  
MacPorts charter as a Mac system, I'm not going to let the  
compatibility with other OS's stand in the way of adding support for  
Mac-only features.

James