maintaining packages in macports vs. in a language package manager

[Joshua Root]

On 2017-11-17 13:15 , Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> I'm slowly cleaning up the OCaml ports.
> 
> One of the things of note is that these days (and this wasn't true a
> couple of years ago), OCaml encourages the use of the "opam" package
> manager, which is something like the Ruby "Gems" system or various
> other language specific package managers.
> 
> 0) How do we handle builds of ports where the language maintainers
> really would prefer that some language-specific package manager build
> the package?

If the language-specific tools can be made to behave properly for
MacPorts (installing into a destroot, not fetching their own
dependencies, etc.) then we can run them from portfiles. If not, we
really can't.

If they install somewhere that won't conflict with MacPorts-installed
packages, we can perhaps tell users to just use opam for some classes of
packages: specifically those that don't depend on anything that opam
can't install, and are not depended on by anything that opam can't
install. If those conditions don't hold, then it needs to be a port so
MacPorts can manage the dependencies. (Non-ocaml examples: git depends
on p5.26-authen-sasl; py27-pillow depends on webp.)

> 1) Given that there are 289 ocaml- ports in devel/, should we have a
> category for ocaml the way we do for ruby?

Sounds reasonable.

- Josh