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

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

	I forgot the icing on the cake:

On Oct 27, 2007, at 6:20 PM, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:


> 	Building (binary) *packages* (and not "archives" as produced by  
> archivemode and as explained by Anders), is one of MacPorts topmost  
> long term goals, but trust me when I say that doing them right is  
> by far much much more difficult than it sounds:
>
> 1) putting together a clean build environment and off it creating  
> reliable, traceable & reproducible builds of a particular port,  
> it's "destroot". A lot of work on this front has gone into MacPorts  
> lately (mainly Eugene Epimenov's "trace mode" improvements) but  
> unfortunately we're still lacking some key functionality to call  
> our software infrastructure "complete" (runtime actions logging and  
> server side processing of the build logs, among other things). I've  
> been very busy with our new website lately but do plan to devote  
> some energy into this in the hopefully not too distant future.
>
> 2) Once the build product, the destroot, is done and considered  
> reliable, packaging it into, say, an rpm and/or a deb package is a  
> completely different topic, with its own intricacies and  
> integration issues between MacPorts and the packaging format we  
> still need to sort out.


3) Package distribution and install time dependency resolving (which  
is different from build time dependency resolving, what MacPorts  
currently has) is yet a new dimension we also need to tie into to do  
packages "the right way". Granted that modern package managers have a  
sizable bit of this work covered already, but that by no means  
guarantees that we'll be able to drive blindfolded once we enter that  
terrain.

	Again, not-trying-to-discourage-anyone-but-actually-setting-the- 
record-straight-to-explain-why-we're-taking-so-long-to-deliver- 
packages....


-jmpp