NonTcl Portfiles

[George Armah]

(First two attempts at sending this email failed. Hope this one works)

Hello,

I was reading through the Portfile Development section of MacPorts Guide
and an idea occurred to me.
It has been mentioned before that having Tcl as MacPorts' base language
does shy away some potential developers and port contributers / maintainers.

The Basic Portfile example (or some variant of it) looks like something
that could easily be typed in a plain old text file. Would it be possible to
create a Tcl
tool that parses Portfiles that are in for example .txt file formats? The
exact format of the text in
the file would probably be different from the current Tcl portfiles (and
hopefully simpler as a
result).
That way potential port maintainers who don't know any Tcl won't shy
away from contributing and maintaining ports.

I myself don't know too much Tcl (but am willing to learn) and currently
have my hands full with GSoC. I'll however be willing to work on such a
project after
summer is over if I have some help getting started.


Let me know if this idea sounds feasible or if there is already such a
tool out there which I didn't know about,

Thanks,

George.
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