General ports questions

[Joshua Root]

Scott Haneda wrote:
> I have head on these lists here that MacPorts is not only used by Mac
> systems.  Reading the docs, I see some very Mac centric things, like
> LaunchD.  Does MacPorts know the system it is on and know to not install
> those things where it would conflict?  Or do I have this wrong, and
> MacPorts only installs on OS X and darwin derivatives, so Linux is not
> in this list?

MP itself works fine on non-darwin systems AFAIK. The startup item code
is actually smart enough to create something that should work on
whichever platform it's on. That means launchd plists for >Tiger,
systemstarter scripts on <=Panther, and RCng scripts on other platforms.

Individual ports may or may not work on any given platform. For example,
dbus does some non-portable things that should really be in a 'platform
darwin' section, like applying the launchd support patch.

> If the above is true, and my port distro has rc files in them, knowing
> those are not going to work, is it ok to remove those on install?  How
> much liberty does a port author take in delting files since the work is
> not entirely mine, I do not want to change the developers files too
> much.  Then again, as far as I can see, rc files are useless to OS X.
> 
> The software I am making a port file for now has very outdated docs in
> it, as well as docs for windows.  Is it again taking too much liberty to
> remove these?  In docs, I would put a .url file pointing to new online
> docs.

It's entirely up to you which platforms you want to support in your
ports, and which files are useful to install. Use your judgement.

> I have been building this portfile up as I go, it has 15 dependencies it
> needs. Each of those are perl mods and has sub dependencies.  Is there
> any way now, post development, to get a list of what I have done?  How
> do I determine the order easily?  For example, I need p5-mail-foo, but
> that needs p5-mail-bar, which also needs p5-mail-baz.  So I think I need
> to install p5-mail-baz first.  Is there any automatic way to get the
> order, or do I just need to uninstall and take notes?

There's not really an easier way if you haven't been adding the right
dependencies to the ports as you go.

> How long does it take to get a portfile accepted?

Not long at all if it doesn't need corrections.

- Josh