A Plea to Reduce Dependences (e.g., for swig)
Blair Zajac
blair at orcaware.com
Wed Aug 17 13:52:06 PDT 2011
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
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