removal suggestion: port rpm

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Aug 19, 2013, at 5:23 PM, Anders F Björklund <afb at macports.org> wrote:
>> I considered attempting to fix those, but it is not
>> clear to me what purpose this code ever served and I don't think it is
>> still being used.
> 
> It was used to build stand-alone rpm packages, similar to the pkg ones.
> Then you could install those without building from port, only using rpm.

there was also the (long-ago) dp-lite (dplite?) branch that did build to rpm and used rpm to install 

> I don't think anyone ever used the dpkg backend, it was probably more
> of a "because we could" ? 

I think someone (or a few people) did in the early days.

A (poor) early design goal was to be package manager agnostic. Later, when it was decided that that wasn't really a good thing (or a really workable solution if we wanted something that worked really well), we avoided choosing rpm/dpkg because there was an idea that we might integrate with apple-provided software installs (in some sort of unified registry) and/or be included as an optional install with an OS release [and Apple wouldn't do that with either rpm or dpkg because of their licenses].

I don't know if anyone remembers the mythical apkg (which I don't think ever amounted to anything)...

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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