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

[Joshua Root]

On 2013-8-22 19:54 , Clemens Lang wrote:
> 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.

The downloading twice thing is certainly suboptimal and no doubt it
could be fixed.

> 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.

Yep, that's what portindex -a did.

- Josh