[GSoC][Binaries support] Architecture

[Anders F Björklund]

(continued, from premature send)

Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

> That deceptively simple little command is the reason we don't have binary packages *already*.  Seriously.  If we hadn't hit this issue and gotten into a big argument about how best to solve it, there would have been binary package support in the very first version of MacPorts that Apple released!   The problem isn't the specific post-install rule that ccal is using, either - it's very simple, yes?  A simple ui_msg to tell the user how to use ccal.  The problem is that you can do *anything* from this rule and over 115 ports in the current collection do.  They use it for creating custom users in the accounts database (if you install postgres, for example, it needs a postgres user account to run as), they use it for emitting helpful "post installation comments" as you see above, they can create special symbolic links or create custom configuration files, etc.  Go grep for post-install in all of the ports today and you will quickly come to realize the scope of the problem, and that's just today with a comparatively small 7870 ports in the collection (FreeBSD has over 22000).

There could have been archives (pre-compiled destroots), even if the ports wasn't ready for binary archives.

But in the first versions of MacPorts, it did build .rpm packages of all of the ports. Don't recall scripts.

> This isn't the only bit of "intelligent runtime" behavior, of course.  The package install command (lets call it ``pkg'') also needs to follow @pkgdep lines in that +CONTENTS file in order to install dependent packages (ccal doesn't have any, but most ports do) and possibly other bits of post-install behavior that folks have come up with (I think there's even a fancy way of adding user accounts now, but I could be wrong).  All of those commands need to be run at the very end of a "pkg install ccal" command, and that means one of two reasonable choices:
> 
> 1. pkg needs to be able to instantiate a tcl runtime environment that can pull in all of the port 1.0 Tcl files such that the post-install (and any other special post installation procedures) can run with the full environment, e.g. commands like "ui_msg" will be present and variables like ${name} will expand properly.

Maybe this is better handled by "port -b", if it needs the full environment anyway ?

> 2. We need to create a different set of "installation commands or scripts" that are associated with a port and specifically designed to run at post-installation time, e.g. instead of a post-install command in Tcl, we would have some sort of "install script" that is bundled with the port and merely relies on a few key environment variables to be set in order to run.  Then all 115 ports which currently declare post-install need to be modified such that they use the external script instead, and the port(1) system needs to stop running (or looking for) the post-install command and instead chain to the script so that "port install blah" still does the same thing as "pkg install blah".

This would probably be better, either @exec/@unexec or something much more "tailored" ?

> Option #1 is the easiest from a perspective of not having to really change any existing ports, but then you need to solve the problem of how to install the ports infrastructure on a machine that doesn't already have it.  The actual ports runtime is less than a megabyte or so, and it would be easy enough to create a package out of it and then @pkgdep it from every port built by MacPorts (this also assumes that the bit of infrastructure you write to follow @pkgdep directives will not depend on the port system itself but be part of the "bootstrapper").
> 
> Option #2 is the simplest in terms of not having to instantiate a full Tcl environment instead of pkg(1), but you'd then have to change the way all ports/pkgs are installed.

I think it would be best to *not* have a Tcl interpreter (and thus ignore +PORTFILE), as long as it can interact with the registry. It should have "enough" information in the +CONTENTS, even if it requires modifying those 115 out of 7870 ports that require it. Otherwise there isn't much of a difference between port(1) and pkg(1) ? But you would still need to re-implement all the other bits - like compression, signatures, depsolving, etc. etc.

> I honestly have no preference at this point given that Landon and I managed to argue ourselves into a stalemate over the question of port runtime versioning, how to deal with different architectures (there's not just a Tcl piece, but also Pextlib) and blah blah blah, and in hindsight I think we vastly overcomplicated the problem in our minds.  The actual implementation, particularly now that we've learned that the port system never versions (we're still at 1.0 how many years later? :)) and there's really only one architecture working caring about now (x86_64), of option #1, should you choose to go that way, should be pretty easy to get to "good enough" status.

MacPorts spent a couple of years discussing the optimal logging format, instead of actually implementing it. So that seems rather common. Hopefully at least archives can be delivered this time, before moving on to packages.

> Note that I'm also glossing over details concerning direct vs image mode and whether an activate step is needed in pkg(1), in which case everything I said above about post-install also applies to pre/post-activate commands.
> 
> I realize that this is a little long, but I figured the least I could do to atone for the lack of binary packages being in MacPorts from day 1 was to describe the problem space in as much detail as I could recall...  HTH!

Fink has a better situation by using an existing package manager (dpkg), even if it's not without flaws. Like needing /sw and /sw64, instead of universal binaries. But at least it has had binary packages from Day 1...

--anders