Fetching ports from remote URLs (Was: Removing mport:// sources)

[Clemens Lang]

Hi,

On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 11:28:45AM +0200, Rainer Müller wrote:
> Is this something we should recommend here?
> https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/InstallingOlderPort

While it might make a nice addition for some niche requirements, I'm not
sure it would be very useful on the InstallingOlderPort page, because of
the limited applicability and the requirement of an existing binary
image. Also, the binary image is downloaded twice using this method -
while this might not matter for small archives, it certainly is an issue
for, e.g., qt4-mac.

Something not mentioned in this thread yet, but also possible, is
installing from a tarball that contains a port directory, e.g.,
  port install http://files.neverpanic.de/mpvim.tar.
We could use that feature to build a website that helps users to find an
older version of a port and gives them the correct URL to install it,
possibly generating the required tarballs on the fly.

-- 
Clemens Lang