GSoC relocatable packages

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Friday March 06 2015 16:41:49 Bradley Giesbrecht wrote:

>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]

Meaning anything not Linux I presume (after re-reading your message twice ;))?

>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. 

I'm not sure I get it. You're after a HomeBrew like way of installing packages, in which everything lives in its own cell and whatever magic required is used to make them co-operate?
MacPorts already has a package creation feature, isn't that what they (Octave) are really after? I haven't checked for a while, but I seem to recall that last time I did there was an installer for the full product for OS X.

>If all Octave deps are at current release than Octave is probably broke.
                                         ^ not ??

>
>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.

I don't know if this is relevant, but Digia's Qt 5.4.0 installers recently had a glitch in which certain frameworks contained references to /opt/local/lib/lib?.dylib (I can remember at least libz).

R