Is it worth persevering with Macports_Framework?

[Landon J Fuller]

On Feb 12, 2013, at 5:05 AM, Rainer Müller <raimue at macports.org> wrote:

> On 2013-02-10 18:51, Kevin Walzer wrote:
>> On 2/10/13 1:39 AM, Ian Wadham wrote:
>>> Should I persevere with Macports_Framework?  It's been a while since I
>>> worked with threads and concurrent processes and Apple's way of doing
>>> things, in Objective C, OS X and Xcode is all new to me.  I enjoy a
>>> challenge,
>>> but in this case, is it (Macports_Framework) worth the effort?  People
>>> are
>>> lukewarm about having a GUI for Macports anyway.  I am not, but I find
>>> the framework for interacting with Macports to be huge and rather
>>> daunting.
>> 
>> It's been my observation that as long as MacPort devs have worked on a
>> GUI, they have tried to do it the hard way--writing it in Cocoa, and
>> making use of MacPorts internals.
> 
> From the initial design, the Tcl library macports1.0 was always meant to
> be used by different clients.

Indeed. *Way* back in the day, we even had a GUI MacPorts client that shipped with a WWDC developer release. It used the macports1.0 API and included some decent glue code for bridging Tcl<->ObjC. If I was looking to create a GUI for MacPorts now, that's the direction I'd take. The code for that was IIRC hosted at OpenDarwin, but I have no idea where it is now.

There have been various partial efforts to revisit the Tcl<->C/ObjC bindings question, and possibly replacing some of the MacPorts core in C/ObjC. Take a look at base/src/cflib1.0 and base/src/tclobjc1.0, for example.

If I were ever to revisit the problem space again, I'd use this as a jumping off point to begin reimplementing portions of the stack in C/ObjC and replacing Tcl -- slowly working my way down the stack to the point that eventually only the actual port interpreter was running Tcl for the purpose of scripting port build/installation.

However, I'm personally not going to revisit this again, and YMMV :)

-landonf

[apologies to Rainer for sending this twice. I sent it from the wrong e-mail address the first time]