GSoC 2013: Binaries Idea

[Marcelo Galvão Póvoa]

Greetings!

My name is Marcelo Galvão Póvoa, a Computer Science graduate student from
UNICAMP, Brazil. I have been using Macports happily for a few years now but
something that always annoyed me was the long build times for some ports
every time I was updating them. More recently, there was the introduction
of some pre-built ports, which was a relief. I hope to see more binary
ports available to make the installation/upgrade process snappier and also
more eco-friendly. :)

I think binary packages could benefit from some other useful perks such as:
prior disk space requirement information and being able to query port
contents such as in [1]. Of course, I am not suggesting removing current
"build from source" capability, but keeping both options instead.

I have a few questions I want to ask to better understand this project:
- Do I need prior knowledge of Tcl to be able to tackle this project? I
have some experience with bash script.
- Why some ports are not available as binary packages? Are there
portability issues in compiling these?
- I didn't find much information about the current status of the binary
building system, could someone elaborate on that? Specifically, which other
tasks does this project expect besides those mentioned in the wiki?

I am looking forward to your response.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pkgfile

Marcelo
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