macports fetch suggestion

[Joshua Root]

On 2011-9-13 01:17 , Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On Sep 12, 2011, at 09:34, Anders F Björklund wrote:
>> The archives could be extended to packages with a few extra metadata, at least there's nothing fundamentally different from the MacPorts "archives" and the FreeBSD "packages" in terms of format. But there seems to be little reason to keep "supporting" RPM if it is never going to be used directly anyway. That goes for both MacPorts and FreeBSD... Stick with them old tarballs.
> 
> I don't know why MacPorts contains any rpm code or what it was supposed to be useful for.

"Why not?" There was a lot of talk back in the OpenDarwin days about
Apple adopting a better format than .pkg, and rpm was one of the
candidates suggested.

See e.g. <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.opendarwin.darwinports/2012>.

There was also the whole DPLight thing,
<http://web.archive.org/web/20070216155828/http://opendarwin.org/projects/dplight/>.

>> Just saying that if you're going to call the archives packages, might as well simplify things ?
> 
> Again I think it's only ever not simple when you talk about it. :) It's already simple for me. I just don't see the distinctions you make between archives and packages. I'll use either word at random depending on what pops into my head first.

Packages contain all the metadata needed for a package manager (which is
much simpler than a ports system) to install them and track
dependencies, without needing the system that was used to build the
source. Archives don't offer that. Simple.

- Josh