Perl 5.8.8 already present on Leopard; can I make a "dummy" Portfile?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jan 17, 2008, at 08:08, Philip K.F. Hölzenspies wrote:

> You'll have to excuse me for my ignorance with regards to  
> Portfiles, since I'm
> a relative newbe ;)

Welcome to MacPorts!


> I was playing around with the ghc Portfile in an attempt to update  
> it to the
> newer ghc version. While playing with this portfile, I noticed that  
> quite a
> few of the packages I need / use list perl 5.8.8 as a dependency.  
> Macports
> assumes that the Development Tools are installed. In Leopard, the  
> DT package
> includes perl 5.8.8 and quite a number of the p5-* packages.
>
> The portfile database on macports.org/ports.php lists the perl  
> 5.8.8 package
> as having no maintainer. Thus, there seems to be no one to do my  
> work for
> me ;)
>
> What I wanted to ask is whether it is possible to create a "dummy"  
> Portfile
> for Leopard. I tried simply adding the following to the existing  
> perl 5.8.8
> Portfile, but ran into (no doubt obvious) trouble:
>
> platform darwin 9 {
>         fetch {}
>         checksum {}
>         extract {}
>         patch {}
>         configure {}
>         build {}
>         test {}
>         destroot {}
> }
>
> Is there a cleaner / better way to say "this portfile is installed  
> by default
> on this platform" or - better still - to check for it and based on  
> that check
> do or do not do the install?


There are portfiles for many things that are already part of Mac OS  
X. This is deliberate:

http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/wiki/ 
FAQ#WhyisMacPortsusingitsownlibraries