Package delivery without XCode

[Daniel J. Luke]

> On May 18, 2015, at 5:11 PM, Craig Treleaven <ctreleaven at macports.org> wrote:
> At 11:56 AM -0400 5/18/15, Brandon Allbery wrote:
>> On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 11:01 AM, Craig Treleaven <<mailto:ctreleaven at macports.org>ctreleaven at macports.org> wrote:
>> ...
>> OTOH, someone posted some information several weeks ago explaining how to determine if that licence conflict really applies or not. (Involves inspecting library linkages, as I recall.)  I get the impression that our current policy is quite conservative and that a number of packages (many?) may actually qualify for binary distribution with some analysis and verification.
>> 
>> But someone needs to put in that time --- and time is always a problem in a volunteer-run project.
> 
> Understood, I'm trying to gauge whether there is interest in taking MacPorts in this direction.  Right now, as I see it, MacPorts is pretty much geared to coders and sophisticated users (system/network administrators, etc).  There exists a wider group of folks who just want to run a specific application or two (say Darktable and Gimp, just for instance).  If such users could just install "Pallet-lite" and then be able to install any of a few dozen major open-source applications, that might be pretty popular.
> 
> In some ways, it might be the Mac App Store for open source.

we essentially have had that at different times in the past - there was an old branch that pushed the build products into rpms and did install only from rpms too (so MacPorts was just a build system and didn’t have to do any of the package management stuff).

as a project, we need to decide if we want to extend MacPorts to make it less of an 80% package-manager solution (and if so, who is going to work on it?) or if it makes sense to once again look to leverage another project (just pick a package manager and have macports feed into it).

--
Daniel J. Luke                                                                   
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