MacPorts hosted mdmg

[Marko Käning]

Brad,

On 15 Mar 2015, at 00:02 , Bradley Giesbrecht <pixilla at macports.org> wrote:
> I think we have an opportunity to extend what MacPorts does well to include relocatable
> packages or mdmg packages in a way that third parties can build distributable packages
> untethered from MacPorts and Xcode. Gimp, Kdenlive, digiKam, Octave and many KDE “things"
> would sing praises to MacPorts.

I fully concur with you, but I guess that must be a major undertaking…


Yet it would be really nice to have a feature like that!

Imagine you want to ship, say, one of these KDE games. They are nice and small, but need the
whole background of KDE4/KF5 libs for them to function - of course.

Instead of shipping KDE or KF5 as a whole with each and every little game, it would be very
nice to have a means to redistributeably install a meta-port like kde4-workspace (as discussed
in the before-mentioned parallel thread) which then would include everything needed for properly
running any KDE4 application.

One would then have to ship only the meta-port mdmv package and the several mdmg packages for
the whatever KDE4 application.

All these would - IDEALLY - have to be built in such a way that they can coexist with an
existing MacPorts installation, I suppose. This does not only mean that the PREFIX shouldn’t
be /opt/local, but merely also that the application’s configuration data needs to be put in
location(s) separate from the standard ones used by a normal MacPorts install… Think about

	/Library/Launch(Agents|Daemons)
	[~]/Library/Application Support
	~/Library/Preferences/KDE
	~/Library/Caches
	~/.config
	~/.(cache|config)

and possibly quite a few others.

Since this is even more complicated, for a start I think, one would surely like to avoid such
a coinstallable approach. However, not having it would make testing pretty hard (if not even
close to impossible), I am afraid.

Greets,
Marko
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