Homebrew

[Francis Devereux]

On 18 May 2010, at 13:51, 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.

I use a local repository for version bump portfiles, and I do  
contribute the changes by by raising tickets with patches attached.   
How could I develop the new versions if I didn't use a local  
repository?  If I just edit the portfiles in the main repository then  
my changes would get blown away by "port selfupdate" wouldn't they?

>
>> For example, if I didn't want "port upgrade outdated" to upgrade  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 *love* the control that Gentoo gives me over package versions - I  
like to have the stable, tested, version of most packages but often  
need the very latest version of a particular package for a bug fix or  
new functionality, and Gentoo allows me to have that mixture.

If I have a problem with a Gentoo package, especially one marked as  
stable, I will report the issue (if nobody else has already) even if I  
can personally work around it by using an older version.  I admit that  
not everyone would do this though.

I tried Gentoo for OSX a few months ago but found that the package  
selection wasn't as good as Gentoo's.

Francis