MacPorts hosted mdmg

[Craig Treleaven]

At 4:02 PM -0700 3/14/15, Bradley Giesbrecht wrote:
>On Mar 14, 2015, at 2:26 PM, Marko Käning <MK-MacPorts at techno.ms> wrote:
>...
>>  Installing all these dependencies is only 
>>acceptable for techies like us, but a normal
>>  user will never bother to deal with all the hassle.
>
>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 created mythtv-pkg.27 solely to facilitate 
creating an installer package.  Currently, 
MacPorts makes it possible to do something that 
would otherwise be much more difficult.  As 
Clemens pointed out, it would be really nice if 
post-activate actions were automatically 
converted to postflight scripts.  Better handling 
of launchd stuff would also be nice.  Neither of 
these things are show-stoppers, though.  One just 
has to provide clear user instructions for the 
bits that have to be done manually.

If we wanted to use the buildbots to assist with 
such packaging, I would think that we should add 
a directive to the appropriate portfiles that 
cause them to be packaged.  Packaging individual 
libraries would be of no value.  Packaging is 
valuable for those user-facing applications where 
upstream doesn't regularly produce dmg's.

Right now, I use Parallels to maintain several OS 
X environments to test building and deploying my 
Myth package.  Putting some of that load on the 
buildbots would be darn nice.  Especially making 
installers for each major OS version.  But I 
would still want to test on a virgin system 
before inflicting it on unsuspecting users.

Craig