*-devel ports

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2008-02-06 22:58:56 -0600, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> It's not really the place of a MacPorts port maintainer to second-guess 
> the developer of the software regarding what version is stable enough for 
> a user to use.

The following may be useful to decide:
  * read the development mailing-list;
  * see what other distributions do;
  * look at the date of the latest stable release.

For instance, Debian/stable has:
  * mutt 1.5.13 (the 1.4 stable version was released in May 2002, and
    there have been a few security fixes since, and I don't even think
    that all security fixes have been applied to 1.4).
  * zsh 4.3.2 (the 4.2.0 stable version was released in March 2004,
    with a few bug fixes since, but no UTF-8 support, while this would
    be quite important, in particular under Mac OS X, as HFS+ stores
    filenames in UTF-8).

Note that even though Debian distributes a development version of zsh,
it also has zsh-beta, which more or less corresponds to the HEAD (and
can be installed in parallel).

> Some of our non-devel ports do install development versions because
> the latest releases don't work at all or are years out of date, say.
> But generally this should not be the case. If you think the latest
> stable release of a program is not suitable, then you should push
> the developers to make a new release that is.

I don't think that MacPorts users have enough power.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)