Manual install

[Rainer Müller]

paul beard wrote:
> Just out of curiousity, what is involved in making this work? Assuming I 
> have the package installed and working on machine A, I could use "port 
> contents foo" and pass that to zip or tar. That gives me all the files 
> in a port neatly stowed in an archive. If I add the receipt file, is 
> there a registry that reads and manages that or is it just the text 
> files on disk? 

Additional to the receipt file for every port, there is the file_map 
which stores which files belong to which port. It is a huge file, but 
with registry2.0 this will change into a sqlite database (hopefully soon).

> The reason I ask is that a. it would be very useful to have this 
> feature, especially on systems without a lot of horsepower (given the 
> high degree of standardization on this hardware, why compile anything 
> yourself, if a compile farm exists to do that?) and b. I have done the 
> steps above to get around packages that don't build, and I wonder how 
> much cruft that introduces. 

I heard there once was a plan to add a light version of DarwinPorts 
(dp-light) into packages to add them to the registry on installation, 
but it turned out that the parts of it are so interweaved that the whole 
thing was needed to do so... Never used it though, this is just what I 
have been told.

But back to achieve what you requested. Archives should work already, I 
believe. You can create archives on one machine and use it on another 
(using port -b with archivemode enabled). It packs the destroot into an 
archive so you can just install it on another machine the "usual" way. I 
think this is what you need.

Rainer