GSoC idea for the binary issue (yet again)

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Mar 27, 2011, at 11:52 PM, Joshua Root wrote:

>> There are a lot of things you seem to be doing to avoid installing a
>> copy of Ports, when I actually have to wonder why this is so important.
>> The entire "ports tree", if you don't actually include the build
>> recipes in dports, is less than 10MB.
> 
> I'm pretty sure that by "ports tree" he means dports/. Avoiding that
> would be a win, as it does take a noticeable amount of time to initially
> download it with rsync. (People have filed bugs because they thought the
> installer had hung.)

Oh, totally agreed that you should never need a copy of the dports/ tree for package installation.  As Anders points out, the individual Portfiles are already inside the relevant packages, so in a sense the dports/ tree and the (someday) packages tree contain overlapping information.  I was talking purely about the MacPorts runtime, which I'm sure this project will also go a long way towards clarifying the boundaries of since separating things into package building and package consumption chains does have a way of forcing the issue, as I described in my earlier history lesson about how the *BSD tools actually evolved separately and were converged later.

- Jordan

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/attachments/20110328/1575ec7e/attachment.html>