Archives and Packages (was Re: Universal and binary builds)

[Anders F Björklund]

Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

>  I could easily see the MacPorts project saying, in some collective  
> consciousness fashion: "Hey, we nearly died and came back to life!   
> We have a lot more ports than we ever did before, a lot of them  
> even work now, so hey, what the hell do you want, BLOOD?  Go peddle  
> your binary packages somewhere else!  We're busy!"   I can see a  
> whole lot of justification for that point of view, which is why  
> it's always with a sense of unease and mixed feelings that I even  
> get into this whole, stupid packaging discussion from time to  
> time. :-)

That pretty much happened. Binary packages don't help if the source  
don't work.

But then it went from there (we're busy), to "MacPorts is a source  
distribution".

> That said, should MacPorts ever DO decide to go from having  
> thousands of users to having hundreds of thousands, or even  
> millions, of users, I don't think I'm way out of line in suggesting  
> that one reason will be because checklist items 1-4 were finally  
> checked off by somebody.  It CAN be done, Anders' tales of woe from  
> previous MacPorts attempts in this area notwithstanding, with  
> projects like Debian proving it every day (due to the innate  
> superiority of their packaging tools, I suspect).

My tale was more about why simple archiving was chosen over  
packaging, really.

For me it was equally much the death of Darwin and the poor release  
of Leopard.

--anders