Creating source packages?

[Jay Levitt]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On Sep 22, 2008, at 9:22 AM, Jay Levitt wrote:
> 
>> I have a developer who lives in a rural area, with no broadband access.
>> (OK, stop laughing.)  Worse, his 28.8K dialup ISP has an 8-hour max
>> session time, so anything signifcantly large just can't be downloaded,
>> period.
> 
> Oh, I'm not laughing. My aunt was stuck on 28.8Kbps until recently when 
> she finally upgraded to ISDN. Hooray for 64Kbps! Now she can finally 
> download her own OS updates instead of me having to burn CDs for her.

Ha!  Would you believe he's too far from the CO for ISDN?  (It's limited to 
18K cable-feet, and he's twice that far.)

The worst part is: He DOES have a WiFi coffee shop nearby, but theirs is one 
of those WiFi routers whose out-of-the-box firmware doesn't play nicely with 
Apple's Airport.  The fix is to upgrade the firmware, but ever try 
convincing a coffee shop to upgrade their firmware for you?

> There isn't any such thing as a "source package" in MacPorts, but you 
> can certainly download distfiles, burn them to a DVD, and have your 
> developer copy them to /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles. MacPorts will 
> happily use them, assuming they're in fact the correct file (that the 
> checksum matches what's in the corresponding Portfile).

Ah! Thanks.  I think that is what I'm looking for.  (I don't want to build 
them on my machine, because there are times he'll want to use different 
variants, especially as our configs diverge; he has a Core Duo, so he won't 
be able to move to Snow Leopard.)

Jay