general advice about making a portfile and a binary package?

[Allen McBride]

Hello all,

Even though I'm not a developer, I've been looking for ways to help  
make it easier for Mac users to install GNU Solfege.  If one has the  
dependencies (I have them thanks to all the MacPorts stuff I've  
installed, I think), Solfege will compile with ./configure, make, sudo  
make install.  So I thought I might try to make a Portfile for it,  
even though I've never done anything like that before.  But I followed  
the instructions, and it worked.  MacPorts installed a working  
executable in /opt/local/bin.

Then I got greedy.  I saw in the MacPorts documentation that MacPorts  
can make .dmg files.  So even though I've never done anything like  
that before either, I tried it.  I just typed "sudo port -f  
destroot" (got that from some Googling) and then "sudo port dmg" from  
the same directory as my Portfile.  Given how far over my head I was  
at this point, I really didn't expect it to work, but it did.  I got  
a .dmg and a .pkg, which I installed, and the new executable it put  
into /opt/local/bin works.

My question is, is there any chance the .dmg file I created will work  
for other people?  Could I distribute it to brave testers, with  
warning that it was created by someone who doesn't know what they're  
doing?  Or would that be guaranteed to fail?  (After I did all this I  
looked at the archives a bit, and found a message warning that one  
needs to make the thing install somewhere other than /opt/local/bin.   
Is that just a matter of putting "destroot /usr/local/bin" in the  
Portfile?  And speaking of the archives, is there a way to search them  
without going through one month at a time?)

Any advice would be great, whether it's about MacPorts, or about my  
overall approach, or about things I ought to understand before  
attempting things like this.

Thanks,
Allen McBride