Homebrew

[David Osguthorpe]

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 07:51:16AM -0500, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
> On May 18, 2010, at 07:04, Bradley Giesbrecht wrote:
> 
> > Maybe local repos is something that should be promoted and made more prominent on the homepage and in the guide?
> 
> Personally I've never used a local port repository, don't need one, and don't think regular users should need one either. It seems like it would just promote the practice of users solving problems on their own and not contributing back to the community when they can just shove a file in a folder and it works for them so they move on to the next problem, rather than helping us fix the problem at the source.

not true - we may have made our own changes to eg. gnucash itself which presumably
you dont want added to the macports version
you seem to think macports should be limited to users who want to make no changes
to the underlying software - from what I can see homebrew is predicated on wanting
to make your own changes to the software

- you have just determined that you dont think users who want to do this should be using macports

(I first started using Darwinports - as Macports was known in 2004 - in order to
get a version of gnucash working among other things - a port did not exist initially
- the gnucash I use now has all my financial information including stocks and now
options - which the base gnucash doesnt know about but Ive added methods to handle
- although Im still not sure enough of what Im doing yet to consider contributing
this back to gnucash)

> 
> > For example, if I didn't want "port upgrade outdated" to upgrade openssl I could copy the openssl port to a local repo and have something similar to package masks on gentoo.
> 
> I would rather like for there to be no reason for the user to want to do that. Again, if the user has easy access to a way to install the older version of a port, then they don't report to us the problems they experienced with the current version, which is bad for the project.

I have never, ever done port upgrade - there is no way to revert if something goes wrong
(I have also de-coupled sync so I can sync individual ports - never ever synced up
the whole ports tree)

for example I use pygtk2 for my own software - you do not know that the latest and
greatest version of gtk2 etc. etc. (pango/cairo) will break my software hence
I want to keep pygtk2 as it is - I dont want my upgrade schedule determined by macports
- my primary purpose is doing things with this software and not keeping up
with the latest version 

one of the big issues I have is that there is no versioning of the ports themselves
(well svn does but there is no mechanism to use it - I want to be able to say
keep/revert the portfiles themselves as of eg. some date - which is the only thing that
can be done presently with the ports tree and svn)

David