Appropriateness for inclusion in MacPorts

[Rainer Müller]

On 2017-09-04 14:46, Aaron Madlon-Kay wrote:
> 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.

As Java applications are mostly self-contained without external
dependencies (no dynamically linked libraries), I guess the approach to
just extract the .zip will work.

However, I do not know what kind of compatibility we can expect from the
bytecode.

> 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.

As Andrew already said, fonts are required to be installed to the
system-wide directory /Library/Fonts or per-user into the home at
~/Library/Fonts.

To support installation of fonts via MacPorts, there could be some
script that creates symlinks for the font files stored in ${prefix} to
these system directories. That script could then be triggered in
pre-activate/post-activate to create/remove symlinks. In case these
files already exist, error out and instruct the user how to resolve the
situation.

Rainer