port "cask" -- installing prebuilt binaries

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Jul 29, 2020, at 9:30 PM, Fred Wright <fw at fwright.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Jul 2020, Ken Cunningham wrote:
>> there seems to be demand for replicating the “binary only” installers of homebrew cask.
>> 
>> we have a few ports that do that now, and I see more and more coming in.
> 
>> From the user's perspective, how does that differ from a port that's 
> available as a binary archive?  I presume the idea is that it directly uses a precompiled binary from the upstream source, but from the user's perspective, does it really matter whether it was a binary from upstream or a binary from the buildbots?
> 
> Or is this for ports where upstream doesn't provide source at all?
> 
> Personally, I'd prefer the MacPorts approach if it were less stingy with the binary archives.  Ideally, one should be *able* to build from source, but not be *required* to do so.

How is it stingy? We have binary archives for everything that the buildbots can build that the licenses allow us to distribute, right?

port, by default, will use the binary archives unless you tell it to build from source instead.
-- 
Daniel J. Luke