MacPorts hosted mdmg

[Bradley Giesbrecht]

On Mar 14, 2015, at 12:18 PM, Rainer Müller <raimue at macports.org> wrote:

> 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.

The users I am attempting to serve currently get nothing because installing Xcode, CLT, MacPorts and then installing deps with non-default variants before building the target (octave in this case) is beyond their capabilities or patience.

Regards,
Bradley Giesbrecht (pixilla)

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