The future of installing software on Mac OS X via MacPorts

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 22, 2012, at 14:43, Marko Käning wrote:

> as I understood Mac OS X 10.8 introduces the AppStore also for Mac OS. If I understood correctly it's still optional...

The Mac App Store is provided on OS X 10.6.8 and newer.


> There are rumors that in future Mac OS versions this might be not only the preferred, but the mandatory way to install programs on a machine.

I sincerely hope Apple does not do that; it would suck.

Perhaps you are referring to the following suckiness:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/features.html#gatekeeper


> If this is not just a joke, what about MacPorts' future?

Apple re-packaged Xcode as a standalone app so that it could exist on the Mac App Store. We would consider doing something similar, and rewriting MacPorts to be totally contained within an application bundle (we could include the Pallet app for example). I can think of numerous ways this would suck, including a lot of work to change things and several things we're doing now that we wouldn't be able to do with that new scheme (installing app icons for ports; launchd plists installed to their correct locations; kernel modules; ...).