GSoC 2013: Binaries Idea

[Joshua Root]

On 2013-4-15 10:44 , Marcelo Galvão Póvoa wrote:
>> There are multiple reasons why a port might not be available as binary:
>>  - First, binary downloads are only used when some configuration
>>    variables are still at their default, e.g. prefix=/opt/local,
>>    applications_dir=/Applications/MacPorts.
>>  - Second, we only build the default variants of every port. Building
>>    every possible combination of variants would probably be
>>    computationally expensive. We're trying to gather statistical data to
>>    build popular variants, but that work hasn't been deployed yet.

> I think approaching the second point would be interesting in this
> project. Is there a tool to gather these statistics available
> somewhere?

I'm doubtful that this alone would be sufficient for GSoC. A simple
config file checked into svn and some small changes to the MPAB script
would be all it takes to build multiple variant sets per port.

Gathering the stats was a previous GSoC project.

- Josh