ASSP out of date

[Bryan Blackburn]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 06:06:17PM -0800, Scott Haneda said:
[...]
>
> 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.

Learning the port commands and the Porfile syntax is obviously needed, but
Tcl shouldn't be an absolute.  The basic idea of a Portfile is to be
declarative in nature (name...portname, version...portversion, etc) so the
amount of actual Tcl code in a Portfile should be minimal.  In fact, many
(not sure if it's a majority, but definitely many) Portfiles have no
apparent Tcl code at all, just settings and values for those settings.  Tcl
is really only needed for complicated ports and mucking about in the base
code for MacPorts itself.

>
> 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 ...

For starting out, that could get into the "too much information" area, as
detailing what occurs during every phase could overwhelming; perhaps some
kind of beginner step-through of creating a first, basic port (set these
fields, run these port commands) to start off?

>
> 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.

Note that technically, all Portfiles are on your system, whereas it would
take a 'port install' to actually install them...

>  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.

I've definitely seen one area, namely, the "how do I use port in developing
a Portfile" since the guide covers the values you need to know, but not
using port while developing/testing your new Portfile.

Bryan


> --
> Scott
>