Swift Package Manager

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 17, 2020, at 09:29, Ken Cunningham wrote:

> we are not likely to win this...we accept the package manager when it cones to ghc/stack,

We don't really. Having an updated working ghc/stack for some systems was better than not having it for any systems, but it sucks and needs to be fixed.

> and doing this has added a formidable amount of complication to the go ports that is daunting for contributors and maintainers...
> 
> Perhaps we just forget about doing this with ghc /go / swift and friends?
> 
> It seems too much work for the benefit achieved to me, although I get the why...

You are one of our strongest proponents of keeping software working on older systems. A build system that forces fetching from a specific upstream server reduces our ability to build on older systems, since that specific server might have https requirements that older system can't meet. We need to be able to mirror files on our servers so that older MacPorts clients can download from them.

Tying us to a specific upstream server also ties us to the reliability of that server. If it goes down, we go down, and users flood us with bug reports about it. We don't want that.