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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