archive_sites in Portfiles

[Rainer Müller]

On 2011-01-07 04:39 , Jeremy Lavergne wrote:
>> I thought we decided before that we don't want individual
>> maintainers distributing archives, but that we want a central
>> server farm creating and distributing them?

I concur with Ryan, having a central build infrastructure will be
better. MPAB is supposed to build in a chroot, so we know the build was
not influenced by anything specific to the machine of the maintainer.
Also it would give us better port quality while making sure the port
really builds and does not have missing dependencies.

As another problem, if we use keys for each maintainer, how do we make
sure none of the private keys will ever be compromised (carrying around
on mobile devices, tiresome typing of a passphrase, etc.)? I might be a
little bit paranoid on this, but we have to consider the weakest link here.

> Will the build farm handle all supported combinations of OS and architecture?

In the past we discussed that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on Intel x86_64
would be the choice which is most common, so we would start with that.
That was some time ago, but I guess it's still valid. We can always add
others later.

We do not have a lack of equipment for this, the problem is still
writing the software.

> Will the distfile policy change similarly, requiring everyone to download distfiles from official MacPorts mirrors?

It's not about the distribution on an external server, but in which way
the archive was created.

As a side note, be aware that archives are a binary distribution which
still involves unclear legal situation regarding GPL vs. OpenSSL license
[1].

Rainer

[1]
http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2009-April/008105.html