hosting an internal macports server with binaries

[Rick Gigger]

Guido Soranzio wrote:
> 
> On May 8, 2007, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> Such a format does exist: It's called a .pkg file and you interact 
>> with them every time you install an Apple software update. However, I 
>> don't think there's any functionality in MacPorts to create or use 
>> package files.
> 
> That's not correct: the creation of binary packages was indeed one of the
> priorities of the orginal DarwinPorts project!
> 
> Besides the .pkg format, MacPorts supports (nowadays, theoretically)
> the creation of .dpkg and RPM packages and the automatic building of .dmg
> disk images.
> 
> In better times, there was even a repository 
> (http://packages.opendarwin.org)
> which was populated by running the script base/portmgr/buildall.sh
> and an experimental but usable project by Ole Guldberg Jensen, DPLight,
> which patched DarwinPorts to support directly the RPM registry
> (http://www.opendarwin.org/projects/dplight/): mounting the repositories
> via WebDAV was a simple but perfect solution not only for the final users.
> 
> The most serious issue, however, was the lack of an official uninstaller
> which should be currently -- paradoxically -- one of the first priority of
> the MacPorts project, IMHO. There are some important changes coming with
> Leopard: it has already been announced the use of XAR as the new binary
> format (http://www.nabble.com/xar-in-Mac-OS-X-t2081148.html) as well as
> the support for "automatic Internet download" and "new receipt tools"
> (http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/sessions/index.html). Nothing more has
> been divulged outside the NDA but it is clear that much work will be
> required in order to interact with the new system receipt database and
> to implement some form of reference counting that Mac OS X unfortunately
> doesn't yet manage by itself.

The ideal would be if I could do a separate MacPorts install on some 
box, installing and bulding all the packages I wanted, and then point 
any other box to it and say "give me all of that", and not have to 
rebuild everything every single time.  It's not that bad on a quad xeon 
mac pro but on even and old G5 imac it takes a LONG time to build anything.

Also the ability to add my own ports files would also help but I'm 
guessing that that is already possible.