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

[Anders F Björklund]

Joshua Root wrote:

>> So sticking with the archives seemed like a reasonable approach.
>
> I do think archives should be the short-term goal. The true binary
> distro utopia Jordan describes will naturally be a lot more work.

That is what I figured, so any packages will have to be external "for  
now".

Currently there is support for PKG (mdmg) and RPM (4.4) and XPKG  
(sortof)
To install them, one would use Installer.app or rpm or xpkg as  
appropriate.
But they won't get recorded in the registry, and won't know about  
ports...
So you need to build packages for *everything*, rather than mix and  
match.

There is still the problems with licenses, both with ports and with  
OpenSSL.

>>> My personal response is, "Yes, we know that binaries would be a  
>>> great
>>> feature to have. Now can we stop talking about it and write  
>>> code?" :-)
>>>
>>> Because in the end, this feature request, like every other, is  
>>> waiting
>>> on a volunteer to produce a patch.
>>
>> So you want the dp_light branch updated ? Or a patch for xpkg ?
>>
>> Or should we talk about which code we are about to patch ? ;-)
>
> I figure resurrecting the patch in #8571 would be a good start. Then
> grab archives from MPAB and make them available, and see where  
> things go
> from there.

Remote archives (#8571 or #10919) would be a start, but it would need
to be moved to a separate new phase (e.g. "bindist" or "fetchpackage").
It would also need to grow the basic MD5 and GPG features, presumably
something like PACKAGES.TXT and *.tgz.asc or something similarly simple.

"port install" should also be extended to work with archives as well
as portdirs, by extracting the +PORTFILE and +STATE from the archive.
It should be able to either take a local file path (or a file:// URL),
or a remote archive location (by fetching to a temporary file first).

--anders