Appropriateness for inclusion in MacPorts

[Andrew L. Moore]

Hi Aaron,
I'm not a MacPorts maintainer, but one of MacPorts’s features is that building custom ports is very easy, especially compared to other port implementations.  If you’re familiar with git, create a local branch of the ports tree and add custom ports to your heart's content.  Once you’ve created a new port, run portindex(1) to make it visible to the rest of the system.

Regarding fonts, they seem to be mixed in with various other ports, e.g., TeX.  MacPorts doesn’t generally install into system directories, so if wanted, e.g., to install to /Library/Fonts under macOS, you could certainly achieve that with a custom port, but I don’t think that it would be accepted for inclusion to MacPorts (?)

Hope that helps!
-AM



> On Sep 4, 2017, at 8:46 AM, Aaron Madlon-Kay <aaron+macports at madlon-kay.com> wrote:
> 
> 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

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