Checksum libraries

[Anders F Björklund]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:

>> Since some people want to run MacPorts mirrors on Linux,
>> I re-added the support for using libcrypto for checksums.
> 
> Thanks! I like increased platform-independence. :)

Make no mistake, MacPorts is still highly platform-dependent,
both by choice and by accident. There was a (partial) effort
to have MacPorts 1.6.0 be portable and run on multiple platforms,
including FreeBSD, and even Fedora (Linux) and Ubuntu (Linux)...

It was mostly done to test the "portability" of the code base
after DarwinPorts/Darwin OS died, but it was probably a bad idea.
It's the same problem as with the packages, instead of having
one good format/platform there was several badly supported ones.

MacPorts-1.6.0-10.3-Panther.dmg
MacPorts-1.6.0-10.4-Tiger.dmg
MacPorts-1.6.0-10.5-Leopard.dmg

macports-1.6.0-freebsd-7.0-i386.tbz
macports-1.6.0-0.fc9.i386.rpm
macports_1.6.0-0_hardy_i386.deb


It would be better to have one "MacPorts-2.0.pkg", and have
it support both Leopard and Snow Leopard (also with archives!).
The support for Tiger and Linux is just weighing it down, even
if I still think one of PureDarwin or FreeBSD should be kept...

But if it's just a minimal matter of checksums libraries, and
if it doesn't get in the way of the regular Mac OS X support,
then I don't see why a change like this couldn't be included.
Platform independence, though, needs something other than MP...

--anders


PS. No idea where the Objective-C/Foundation "requirement"
    is going, but theoretically GNUstep should still work ?