Automatic homepage for sourceforge, googlecode, etc.

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 23, 2009, at 03:51, Rainer Müller wrote:

> On 2009-08-22 22:32 , Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> That syntax looks nice. But all the existing use_ options are in
>> MacPorts base code. Part of the motivation for my suggestion is to
>> move this out of MacPorts base and into something inside the dports/
>> _resources directory, e.g. a portgroup.
>
> Well, then a PortGroup would be the better option.

How to handle the colon part of the master_sites definition? e.g.  
port tightvnc says

master_sites sourceforge:vnc-tight

Would we have to do

PortGroup sourceforge 1.0
sourceforge.name vnc-tight

or is there a better idea?


>> I wonder if maybe just renaming the "PortGroup" command would provide
>> satisfaction. Instead of
>>
>> PortGroup sourceforge 1.0
>>
>> it could be
>>
>> include sourceforge 1.0
>>
>> or
>>
>> use sourceforge 1.0
>
> PortGroup is the keyword which matches best with PortSystem. Do we
> really need to change this? The meaning of "PortGroup sourceforge 1.0"
> should still be pretty clear.

I was already thinking further. We could look at ways of turning  
other flags (like the use_ flags) into "portgroups" too. The use_  
flags we currently have in ports are:

use_7z
use_autoconf
use_automake
use_autoreconf
use_bzip2
use_configure
use_dmg
use_lzma
use_parallel_build
use_test
use_xmkmf
use_zip

I could easily see moving the different distfile compression /  
archiving types into "portgroups". Again this would let us support  
new compression types without a new MacPorts release. (e.g. xz was  
recently requested [1]). It would also help with types that don't fit  
neatly into the "one command (or unix pipeline) can decompress and  
extract an archive" mindset MacPorts base currently has. This would  
enable us to support, for example, .dmg.gz, .dmg.zip, etc.

We could write "PortGroup bzip2 1.0" but if we switch the verb  
"PortGroup" to "use" then we could write "use bzip2 1.0" which might  
be a more natural change from "use_bzip2 yes".

use_xmkmf should probably have been a portgroup all along; that fits  
right alongside the existing xcode portgroup.


[1] http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2009-August/ 
009548.html