Easy access to external repositories.

[Artur Szostak]

> A general question: what is the purpose of adding a repo for the ESO software,
> as opposed to just committing the individual Portfiles that exist in that repo to
> the standard MacPorts repo?

In short, for some of the same reasons that repositories like Fedora EPEL and other 3rd party repositories exist.

In our case: we have a community of astronomers that have requested a distribution mechanism for ESO software via MacPorts, which they are familiar with. However, our software is only relevant to astronomers (a few hundred users), rather than the much larger community that the default MacPorts repository it trying to target. So I thought that taking an optional extra repository approach (kind of like Fedora EPEL) would be the most appropriate.
Another issue would be any differences between our release cycle at ESO versus the default MacPorts repository one. I just don't know how compatible these are at the moment. For the time being, it is lower risk for our astronomers for ESO to maintain its own package repository, which it has full control over.
Would it nevertheless make sense to push our changes to the default MacPorts repository in the future? Perhaps. We have considered it and will likely revisit this idea again down the line.

All this has been working fine except for one issue: many of our astronomers get a bit lost when trying to setup our repository in the sources.conf, archive_sites.conf etc. So I thought the best would be to use a Portfile to setup our ESO repository automatically if (and only if) requested by the user. Thus, making the repository optional. This would be a similar idea to what I see with RPMs used to setup 3rd party YUM repositories.
Ultimately my goal is that the astronomy user should be able to do the following from a freshly installed MacPorts system:

  sudo port install esorepo
  sudo port sync
  sudo port install <ESO specific package>

These would be commands that they are familiar with and can understand.


Kind regards.

Artur
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