MacPorts on Other Platforms

[Anders F Björklund]

Rainer Müller wrote:

>> There are not many mac ports working with "platform freebsd",
>> but that's not the goal either (although some might be fixed)
>> The test is more for "base", to test whether it remains working
>> without the proprietary parts... And thus far, it still does.
>
> Although platforms is a mandatory keyword, it is not checked  
> against the
> current platform. So even if ports do not have freebsd in the  
> platforms,
> they will still work very likely on freebsd, too.

What I meant was that even many of those ports that *do* have
freebsd in the platforms field currently fail due to bitrot...

Theoretically one could encase the platform-specific parts
in "platform darwin" and "platform macosx" as appropriate,
but there's not enough reason to do so without portability ?
So most of the current ports (naturally) just assume Mac OS X.

It's not at all impossible to update the ports to work, just a
question of whether doing so would be worth the time and effort.
Kinda like MP supporting Jaguar and Panther, after a while those
extra platform passages are just in the way - and so get deleted ?

But if there's any interest, I could post the failures somewhere.
Mostly it's just about hardcoding .dylib or missing a "platform{}"

--anders


PS. What _is_ the "platforms" keyword really good for, anyway ?
     If it's not being checked, and doesn't allow version/arch ?