port "cask" -- installing prebuilt binaries

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 6, 2020, at 21:20, Ruben Di Battista wrote:

> If they've been built somewhere by the upstream developer, shouldn't we be able to build them too and hence instead of providing them as binaries we would  fix the ports in order to build on old systems? I guess it's a matter of how hard is to fix the build environment on old systems... 

That would be my preference too. We've already addressed many of the reasons why something would fail on an older system: we have newer cctools, ld64, clang available in MacPorts. The one big remaining issue is that a lot of Mac-specific software can only build with the latest SDK, so we need to add a MacOSX.sdk port with subports to install each major version of the SDK. I worked on such a port awhile back but didn't finish it: https://github.com/ryandesign/macports-ports/blob/MacOSX.sdk/devel/MacOSX.sdk/Portfile

An alternative solution is to devise a method where certain ports can opt into being built on a newer system. See https://trac.macports.org/ticket/60878 for more on that proposal.