Hacking in Universal -- Don't!
Landon Fuller
landonf at macports.org
Sat Mar 31 10:28:50 PDT 2007
I received a bug report about the zlib port not working -- it was
modified to use private API in an attempt to hack in Universal support.
The port, which I originally wrote in 2003, went from this:
http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/browser/trunk/dports/
archivers/zlib/Portfile?rev=23414
to this:
http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/browser/trunk/dports/
archivers/zlib/Portfile?rev=22776
This is not an improvement! The port is literally twice as long, but
more importantly, it *FAILS* on different versions of MacPorts
because it uses MacPorts-private undocumented API calls.
I believe we need a very straight-forward policy:
- Do not use undocumented, private API in Portfiles. This will cause
breakage and make the system entirely unmaintainable.
- If making a Portfile "Universal" complicates the Portfile, then
you need to patch the software, not the port.
-landonf
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