Vim - Tarball with Patches vs Mercurial

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 5, 2012, at 11:35, Chris Perl wrote:

> Has any consideration ever been given to building the vim port from
> mercurial as opposed to grabbing the tarball and applying all of the
> necessary patches on top of that?

In MacPorts we would prefer to go to almost extraordinary lengths to use tarballs and patchfiles rather than fetching from a version control system. This is because we can mirror distfiles and patchfiles* so that in case the upstream files go away our users can still install the ports. We also list checksums for each distfile and patchfile* so our users are ensured the software they're installing is the same software the maintainer tested.

If no distfiles are available and fetching from a version control system seems like the only solution, it would still be preferable for the maintainer to package up a distfile of it and upload it and make the port use that. But we're often lazy and resort to fetching directly from the vcs in those cases. Some day we might write a script to automate the creation of such distfiles, at which point we'll have fewer valid excuses.

The developer who initially added the feature to MacPorts has gone so far as to suggest the ability of MacPorts to fetch from a vcs should be removed entirely. But we're not at that point yet.


*Here I refer to patchfiles that are not already included in the port's files directory.