Appropriateness for inclusion in MacPorts

[Aaron Madlon-Kay]

Hi all.

I was wondering if there was any official guidance on what kinds of software was appropriate for inclusion in MacPorts, beyond the phrase "command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software” on macports.org.

Specifically I have two things that seem borderline inappropriate, but that would be useful for me to be able to install via MacPorts:

1. Some OSS Java applications

There are some Java applications I use that have both GUI and CLI components. One of them is bundled by default with a JRE. A trivial port would basically just download a .zip and dump the contents in /Applications/MacPorts, and make a symlink or two in $PREFIX/bin. On the other hand they could be built from source via Maven or Gradle, but I’ve never seen a port like that.

Several Java-based ports I am aware of are Ant, Maven, Gradle, Jython… these all basically just download binaries and maybe make some symlinks, but they are Serious CLI Dev Tools™, so maybe that’s OK for them.

2. OSS Fonts

There are a number of fonts that I use that would be very convenient to have available through MacPorts. This is another “download and extract a binary” situation. Last time I looked I only found X11 fonts in MacPorts, whereas the ones I’m talking about here are mostly TrueType fonts.

So, what say you?

Thanks,
Aaron