binary rpm repos?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 8, 2009, at 00:49, Alexy Khrabrov wrote:

> It turns out RPM works fine on Mac:
>
> http://rpm4darwin.sourceforge.net/

tar and zip and Apple's native installer format pkg work on the Mac too.


> -- why not have reference binaries for all ports in RPM format, to
> avoid endless recompiling if you don't have to?  Watching gobs of
> compiler output fly by doesn't make one a Unix expert, in the immortal
> words of the funroll-loops.info of the "Gentoo is Rice" fame.  Yeah,
> yeah, it depends on what you have -- but look, Red Hat does it!

I agree having binaries available would be useful. We're not missing  
a format like rpm or tar or zip or pkg to keep it wrapped up in. What  
we're missing is code in MacPorts base to properly record everything  
about an install into a binary container so that it can coexist in a  
MacPorts prefix with ports that are compiled from source. Once that  
gets written, then we'll need to write scripts to automatically build  
all ports and package them into whatever binary format we've decided  
on and post the binaries to a server somewhere.