Packages Not [was Re: ambivalence about fortran (was Re: numpy & non-Apple gcc?)]

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Sep 20, 2010, at 2:57 PM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:

> On Sep 20, 2010, at 5:48 PM, Jeremy Lavergne wrote:
>> 
>>> Huh?  There's no semantic quibbling there at all.  I simply said you did not have build success/failure logs there, which is what my original question was about.  You are the one changing the subject here, not me. :-)   I also believe, though it has nothing to do with logging, that there IS a very definite distinction between archives and packages right now in MacPorts, particularly given that archives are not doing anything with the metadata yet (c.f. above discussion with respect to extract vs perform).
>> 
>> The original topic was about time to build packages.
>> My point was MacPorts can already provide pre-built binaries to people. Somehow, by using archive or package I've caused a mess.
>> 
>> Sorry my choices on words was obviously poor, but based on the original subject it should be clear that bantering about packages versus archives has nothing to do with it.
> 
> I think your wording was fine, Jordan is just operating from a very specific definition of package (one that MacPorts has danced around for basically forever).

With all due respect, I don't think the problem lies in my definition, either.  My definition is one shared by Red Hat, Debian, FreeBSD, Solaris and even Mac OS X, if you squint your eyes enough to call Installer.app a package management tool, among many other examples.   The problem lies in all the frickin' DANCING that MacPorts has been doing rather than simply hack something simple together, as I did for FreeBSD, and call it "enough" of a package management to get the church/state separation I talked about earlier in the thread.  There's really no rocket science to this, simply a commitment to stop squishing the problem space into one big wad and claiming that there's no distinction even necessary between building and deploying software.  Landon and I had that distinction in mind since we started the project, we were just foolish enough to think we could hand-wave and claim package-agnosticism by supporting any package format anyone liked.   In hindsight, that was a terrible mistake and we suck for making it.

- Jordan