[GSoC] migration

[Rainer Müller]

Hello Umesh,

good to hear from you! I was afraid we had already lost you...

Where you will push your work to? Either create a new branch (e.g.
gsoc17-migration) in macports/macports-base, or push to your own github
account. It would be good to know which place to watch for updates.

I will answer some of other questions inline below.

On 2017-06-09 00:38, Umesh Singla wrote:
> 2. In the proposal, I had written "what would be desirable is if `port`
> was to /recommend/ a migration upon detecting a new environment", so we
> can have it two ways - either check for the changes in the environment
> before running every command or only check for the changes when a user
> actually uses restore (or migrate) action. 
> 
> While the first one seems to be more realistic from user's perspective
> but running it every time is also not a good idea since OS/hardware
> changes are not frequent. I suggest running the detection for changes in
> architecture before a set of some commands like install, sync,
> selfupdate etc. The second option is actually on-top-of-head type
> solution which assumes the user to be aware of any arch changes by
> himself and thus, is actually not "recommending". Please suggest a way
> to proceed.
> 
> Also, is there any existing action which checks for changes in the
> environment which I can use as a reference. I checked selfupdate but it
> only checks how old port definitions are. Is it sufficed to check for
> universal_arch/build_arch like options in `macports.conf` file,
> comparing it with `uname -a` or `env` command outputs. How rigorous we
> need the detection to be?

Such a check already exists, which is executed an every initialization
of the macports1.0 package. As this is just a simple compare of the OS
version, it is no problem to run this every time. Currently it prints a
link to the Migration wiki page:

https://github.com/macports/macports-base/blob/e3a0dc2ebde62a9c5feac6a1edee1708a95bb02a/src/macports1.0/macports.tcl#L651-L656

> 5. I saw the copyright license on top of most of the files. Do
> developers have this, right from the beginning or after the initial work
> on the module gets finished?

The following goes with the usual IANAL disclaimer. In almost all
jurisdictions, you own the copyright from the moment you create
something. There is no need to explicitly claim copyright any more
(mostly after USA reformed their copyright law in 1989). The headers in
source code files have pure informational use.

In my opinion, it only makes sense to list authors who contributed a
significant amount of code to the file. Most of files in base should
already list "The MacPorts Project". Although not being a legal entity,
this is a kind of placeholder for all contributors holding the joint
copyright ownership.


While I could not answer all your questions right now (I have to leave
some work for Bradley ;-)), feel free to ask questions as much as you
like on the list or via IRC.

Happy hacking on your project!

Rainer