MacPorts hosted mdmg

[Rainer Müller]

On 2015-03-14 14:44, Clemens Lang wrote:
> ----- On 14 Mar, 2015, at 02:04, Bradley Giesbrecht pixilla at macports.org wrote:
> 
>> Has there been a discussion about having the MacPorts buildbots also build mdmg
>> files?
>>
>> This may require a lot of resources so perhaps mdmg could be run for some
>> percentage of requested ports using mpstats?

Not all ports will work when installed as mdmg. The main problem would
be that post-activate scripts are not converted to postflight scripts.

There once was a dp_lite (DarwinPorts Lite) to extract a minimal runtime
to be included in standalone installers.

As we now ship Tcl with base, we probably even had to include a Tcl
interpreter. Our code base is also not organized to isolate a few
commands. As post-activate scripts might run any command, I guess we
would end up with almost everything anyway...

> What would be your use case for that? If you are looking for packages you can
> install without installing MacPorts, I'd argue it's a bad idea to have our
> buildbots generate those, because of the prefix conflict.

Even when using a different prefix (ignoring all user confusion), this
would give the wrong impression of being an officially supported method
of installation. Users do not get any upgrade path with mdmg packages.

Rainer