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

[Blair Zajac]

On 08/17/2011 03:44 AM, Anders F Björklund wrote:
> Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>>> Maybe you could provide more detail (or pointers) about the problems that occurred?  In my experience, there are quite a number of things that can go wrong in the MacPorts model of variants/installed/activated, but as I understand it, those fundamentals have stayed the same for a long time despite their potential for problems.
>>>
>>> (If the only goal is to minimize problems, a ports system that does nothing at all and contains no ports seems like an ideal trouble-free system.  Useless for users, but highly maintainable with few trouble spots.)
>>
>> We have limited time and resources available. We would like to minimize the number of variables, to increase the chance a user will be successfully able to install a port. Requiring dependencies from MacPorts rather than allowing system versions (which can vary drastically across the available Mac OS X releases) was an easy way to do this.
>
> An alternative method, with different drawbacks, is providing
> one ports tree for each version. Fink does this, for instance.

Yes, different drawbacks.  I used to manage some Fink packages and IIRC 
(it's been several years) the port maintainers would have to apply the 
same change to different recipe files, which got to be a pain.  Some 
recipes are not updated on older OSes, e.g. svn which is only current on 
10.7:

http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/svn

So if you have an older system, like a PowerPC PowerBook as I do, then 
you end with with an old software stack.

With MacPorts, you only have to touch one file to get it updated.

Blair