GSoC relocatable packages

[Bradley Giesbrecht]

On Mar 6, 2015, at 2:50 PM, Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org> wrote:

> On 2015-3-7 07:12 , Bradley Giesbrecht wrote:
>> What would be the challenges of producing relocatable packages where a port and all its macports dependents would be prefixed to the package dir and shared libs would use relative paths?
> 
> Convincing everything to use relative paths, mainly. I guess you're
> thinking @rpath for the mach-o files, but paths can end up hardcoded
> into them in other ways, and in other file types.

Thank you for the reply Josh.

I'm prepared to except that not all ports will play nice. Some upstream partners may be very interested fixing their software to make this work. At the GSoC 2014 Mentors Convention (I attended) this idea was put forth by the Octave group. They struggle supporting their user base on [^linux] and what they would really like is a Mac OS X like dmg installer where they could drop a directory somewhere and work from there. They even talked about finding financing if that might help. The Octave dependency tree has deep roots making maintenance all the more difficult. If all Octave deps are at current release than Octave is probably broke.

I believe many other package authors would love a feature like this for OS X; keeping MacPorts at the forefront of relevance for opensource on OS X.


Regards,
Bradley Giesbrecht (pixilla)

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 455 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/attachments/20150306/10bea87b/attachment.sig>