Releasing code as portgroup instead of in base/

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Oct 13, 2014, at 5:54 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Oct 10, 2014, at 9:05 AM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
>> 
>>> I disagree that we should move as many portgroups as possible into base. Moving the portgroups out of base and into the ports tree years ago has been of great benefit in encouraging the development of portgroups. No matter how agile the release process of base may become, nothing compares to being able to put a file in a directory and having it available to the entire MacPorts userbase in minutes.
>> 
>> right - and I'm saying that that's actually a problem
>> 
>> 'easy' injection of code into the tree without going through any kind of release process/review is something we should minimize.
> 
> Playing devil's advocate for a moment, are you suggesting that we institute a similar release process/review for portfile changes?

we should continue improving base/ (non-root execution, sandboxing, trace mode, etc) so that 'rogue' portfiles cannot do damage (or can do limited damage) so that this isn't necessary (or is less necessary).

It would actually be really nice if we kept metadata about individual portfile revisions that indicated if they had been reviewed / had passed some tests, etc. so that end-users could choose what level of validation/verification is appropriate for the environment that they're running in.

> Because if so, that would be stifling, and if not, then I don't see it working very well, since it's previous been very convenient to be able to make changes in portgroups simultaneously with changes in ports. Losing that ability will make working with portgroup more difficult.

it's not all or nothing, but I think we should generally push more code into base/ (especially after an portgroup has matured somewhat) rather than pushing for more and more code out of base/

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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