1.7.0 release candidate 1 available for testing

[Bryan Blackburn]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 04:02:00PM -0600, Ryan Schmidt said:
[...]
>
> Well we certainly need DMGs of 1.7.0-rc1 (so thank you for making them) so 
> that we can verify that the bugs in the 1.6.0 DMG have been fixed.
>
> I don't see why we don't release DMGs for every version of MacPorts.

Actually, unless someone has issues with it, I was planning on creating DMGs
for 1.7.1 as well, since there really isn't any value to only doing DMGs for
X.Y.0 then selfupdate.

Though I thought it quite funny that creating the DMGs was the event that
actually had me install from DMGs for the first time ever...

>
> I also find it odd how the MacPorts installer runs selfupdate. You  
> install, say, MacPorts 1.5.0 from DMG, and after it's done, you have  
> MacPorts 1.6.0 on your hard drive. Strange behavior. Why don't we do what 
> other software does to check for updates? When you run the port command, 
> check with the MacPorts server to see if a new version of MacPorts is 
> available, and if so, print a line notifying the user they should update. 
> It would only check once a week of course, or rather at an interval 
> configurable in macports.conf (where it could also be turned off 
> entirely).

You do have to admit that MacPorts is a bit different than the average Mac
app; we already have the selfupdate procedure and adding something like
Sparkle would be a bit of work to basically do the same thing.  Running a
sync is a must when first installing from DMG since no Portfiles are
included with the DMG, which means that port is quite useless.  Also, if
notifying the user will cause them to run a selfupdate anyway, why shouldn't
we do it on install?

Bryan