Is there any value to packages? [was Re: Why no binaries?]

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 26, 2007, at 13:07, James Sumners wrote:

> I was mulling this over last night as I was going to sleep. It seems
> to me that the port maintainer could be relied upon to build the
> package for his respective port(s). That way, MacPorts doesn't need to
> hunt for a build machine.

The user's machine is unlikely to be clean. For example, the user may  
have other ports installed, and when the user packages a port, that  
packaged port may inadvertently be depending on some of the user's  
other ports without his knowledge. Better to have a build machine (or  
build machines) that can predictably and cleanly create packages.


> Although, someone would need to step up and maintain a cross compiler
> port for the maintainers. That would make it easier for the port
> maintainers to build the packages. If they could do something like
> `port package +g4 +g5 +intel`, I'm sure the idea would go over a lot
> better.

Surely we don't need anything like that. Anyway, it wouldn't be a  
cross compiler port that we would need. Rather, each port would need  
to have this capability retrofitted. It would be very similar to the  
+universal variant we're already trying to retrofit into ports. I  
would much rather we continue working on perfecting that, rather than  
introducing ways to cross-compile things, a capability which would  
probably not be very well tested and therefore buggy.


> Of course, there would then need to be functionality built into port
> to pull down binary packages instead of source packages.

Sure.


> On 10/26/07, paul beard wrote:
>
>> On 10/25/07, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
>>
>>> On Oct 24, 2007, at 10:11 PM, James Sumners wrote:
>>>
>>>> Why doesn't MacPorts supply binary packages?
>>>
>>> No one has worked on it recently.
>>>
>>> If you're interested, I'm sure we would be interested in your help.
>>
>> Is there a status document that addresses where things stand on  
>> efforts like
>> this? I haven't been all that successful at building packages  
>> within port
>> (port pkg foo where foo is something i would rather not build  
>> again on a
>> second machine). I think I may have resorted to taking the output  
>> of "port
>> contents" and wrapping it in a tar or zip command, but that  
>> doesn't add any
>> of the magic of receipts and the rest of the stuff that makes a  
>> ports system
>> worth using.
>>
>> if packages, especially meta-packages, could be licked, it would  
>> make things
>> like gimp and gnome a lot more accessible, as there wouldn't be  
>> the huge
>> build delay. I'm not a coder of any merit so I can't put my  
>> shoulder behind
>> it, but it would be of interest to know if the core team sees any  
>> value in
>> packages (possibly as a component of checkpointing the releases:  
>> as of a
>> given release, one could be assured that a given subset of  
>> essential/popular
>> ports could be installed as source or as packages). It may be one  
>> of those
>> things that is nice to have but lack any support on the core team  
>> or in the
>> user community.