NonTcl Portfiles

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

Now you're just talking crazy talk, George! :-)

Seriously, we we have looked at this a few times in the past (in  
response to the "everyone hates Tcl" as well as other concerns) and  
debate generally seems to polarize around two positions:

A)  Tcl, with its simplistic and context-sensitive syntax, is already  
far more of a textual format than a structured language.  Just make  
the various verbs and nouns in the macports infrastructure a bit more  
descriptive, clean things up here and there, done:  A description  
format that's 90% "option value" and 10% high level functions that  
could read more like english if that was really the goal (Note:  I  
just made those numbers up - it could be substantially more options  
and less functions with certain design decisions).  No need to create  
yet another "user friendly" description format.

B) Tcl is totally NOT machine readable by anything but a Tcl  
interpreter, something which makes data harvesting and/or mass-changes  
across the ports collection really really painful.  It is time for  
Portfiles to be written in XML with a proper DTD!  We can use  
translators to get to and from a human readable format when and if  
editing is actually required, so don't be such a bunch of sissies,  
running away every time the letters X, M and L are mentioned together!

Since no battle like that can ever truly have a clear winner (they're  
both "right" for some value of "right"), we generally decide in the  
end to just leave things alone, which is probably the right decision  
for this iteration of MacPorts.   If we ever do see such a sweeping  
change of the collection, I think it will be because someone decides,  
one day, to write MacPorts "3.0 or later" completely from scratch.    
New Portfile syntax, new infrastructure to go with it, and probably  
some monster Perl script (in Perl6, of course) which manages to  
convert some significant percentage of the old ports into the new  
format.

- Jordan


On Jul 20, 2008, at 3:38 PM, George Armah wrote:

> (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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