port "cask" -- installing prebuilt binaries

[Christopher Chavez]

On 8/4/2020 12:52 PM, Ruben Di Battista wrote:
> One of the reasons I chose Macports for is the fact it builds its own
> tree from source and it ships basically open source only software.

I think there have been cases where MacPorts' preference/insistence on
building from source, even when prebuilt binaries are available, may
have been excessive and/or eventually had negative consequences. One set
of examples is the various ports for Java libraries, many of which are
now outdated or broken. They all appear to be open source, but many also
have a prebuilt non-architecture-specific binary (.jar file) readily
available. Many of these ports no longer build from source with newer
JDK versions (even for some up-to-date ports), but the prebuilt binaries
for these ports often still work with newer Java runtime versions. Had
these ports used the upstream binary instead of building from source, I
wonder if fewer of them would be broken, and that they would've actually
been easier to keep updated and working.