port "cask" -- installing prebuilt binaries

[Ken Cunningham]

> On Aug 6, 2020, at 8:23 AM, Arno Hautala <arno at alum.wpi.edu> wrote:
> 
>> On 6 Aug 2020, at 10:10, Ken Cunningham <ken.cunningham.webuse at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> How about I float a suggestion? We could append "_binary" to the name. Otherwise leave the categories, notes, etc as they are now. 
> 
> Could all of the “cask” ports be put in a second ports tree?

Very very difficult to implement. Not impossible. You’d have to have some new logic in the “port” command, and a new keyword like “cask” or “binary” or some better keyword, that searches a new ports tree. Realistically — not likely to ever happen, and if it does, not likely to happen any time soon.


> Any source-based ports that wanted to depend on those would also need to go in that tree or at least couldn’t be in the source-only tree. The tree wouldn’t ship by default, or at least would have to be enabled (“uncommented”) in a config file.

Now extremely difficult to implement.

> 
> Personally, I dislike the idea of a port name suffix, but an attribute that could be searched for is a good idea.


When you type “port search XYZ”, the idea is to somehow immediately see that XYZ is a prebuilt binary you might or might not want install. If it’s not in the name, I don’t see how to do it.

When you want to know what prebuilt binaries you have installed so you can purge them all, you need to have a simple command you can type to identify them all.

port -v installed | grep binary

is pretty simple. Hopefully someone on this list knows a better way, or perhaps there is a way to make a command internal to “port” do it bettter.

K