A Plea to Reduce Dependences (e.g., for swig)

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 16, 2011, at 17:52, M.E. O'Neill wrote:

> Jeremy Lavergne wrote:
>>> If MacPorts didn't have a propensity to compile everything from source
>> 
>> It doesn't do that by default anymore.
> 
> Strange, because when I look at
> 
> 	http://packages.macports.org/pcre/
> 
> I find no packages for darwin11 (and no ppc packages either), and when I look at
> 
> 	http://packages.macports.org/swig/
> 
> I find nothing at all.
> 
> And those binary packages, who builds them?  Are they signed?  Are we still building packages as root?

The packages are built by our builtbot server, which was just switched on a short while ago. It has not yet succeeded in building all ports. We are working on improving this.

There has been no announcement about the existence of the builtbot or its capabilities or intentions, but my understanding is we are focusing on the systems most users have, which should be Snow Leopard and Lion systems running 64-bit processors. I don't believe we have plans to make PowerPC packages, or packages for Leopard or older. IMHO, PowerPC users are the ones who would most benefit from binaries being available, since those processors are so much slower, but there just aren't that many users with PowerPC computers anymore so it's probably not a priority to set up a PowerPC builtbot.