ASSP out of date

[Scott Haneda]

On Nov 11, 2008, at 5:37 PM, Bryan Blackburn wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 03:43:26PM -0800, Scott Haneda said:
> [...]
>>
>> Ahh nice, thanks.  I am not entirely sure, you guys can be the  
>> gauge of
>> this, but I feel my questions are not that out of the ordinary for  
>> a new
>> port maker.  I do look at the docs before I ask here, either I am a  
>> bad
>> searcher in the docs, or the data is missing.  Google tends to mostly
>> point the the tracker, so that is of little use.
>>
>> If I wanted to start adding stuff like this to the docs, would you  
>> agree
>> it is beneficial, or am I asking questions most people understand?   
>> If you
>> do think it is beneficial, what is the best procedure for making  
>> changes
>> and additions to the docs?
>
> Personally, I'd love to hear your summary of how the guide didn't  
> cover
> things you ran into.  Many of us who know enough to be able to write
> sections in there may not always remember what bits were missing  
> when first
> learning (I wrote my first Portfile 5-6 years ago, so I definitely  
> don't
> remember what the learning curve was like, not to mention Portfiles  
> look a
> bit different now).

You hit the nail on the head.  You would have a assp port file  
working, in I bet, 30 minutes or better, whereas, even though I hack  
around a bit here and there, after work, I am in this a week already.

I will be happy to write you a short summary.  I think the basics of  
it are that it was hard for me to know where to start.  Also,  
consider, people like me may want to add ports, but they get stuck on  
two things, learning the ports commands, and learning tcl.

For starters, I think you need, and I still need, a outline of the  
process.  Simple outline, such as when you enter in `sudo port install  
foo` the file is parsed, it sees the version, grabs it from the url,  
stores it at this file location, runs this command, moves it to this  
location, and finally, deletes whatever here and there, and ...

You get the idea.  There is a large picture here that needs to be  
understood, and that would get people started a lot faster.  I just  
learned the other day that all ports are installed in my system.  I  
had the notion that only a index of the ports were there, and I was  
fetching them when I installed.  This was just an assumption I made,  
that was wrong.  I then started wondering, what happens if the port  
servers are down, how do you resolve that.  Of course, it is not an  
issue, but I think you can agree, that my assumption was not all that  
off the mark. Probably influenced by how CPAN works, and Ports being  
analogous to it to a degree.

Let me get this one working, by then I will be better educated to take  
a step back and see where I had the most issues.
--
Scott