MacPorts from behind proxy servers & fetching the file directly

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,

While discussing GSOC with Umesh, he repeated what we already
discussed during the meeting. Students in campuses (including the one
where he is studying and from which roughly 40 students participate in
GSOC each year) might be behind proxies and might not even be able to
run MacPorts due to blocked rsync.

If you try to install the software and not even the installation works
... well, then you probably go for alternatives. I didn't want to
point this out in the context of GSOC, but just wanted to provide an
example of things that could drive our potential users and developers
away.

Umesh was only able to work on MacPorts because he was at home during summer.

Rainer was thinking of working on fetching the updates from the file
directly (using curl/wget or whatever) instead of using rsync, but
there was no time to work on that during the meeting anyway.

I just wanted to repeat the need for solving that problem. (People who
are not able to use MacPorts would likely just switch to a different
package manager rather than report the problem.)

Mojca