port install efficiency issue

[Bryan Blackburn]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 11:19:35AM -0700, Darren Weber said:
[...]
> 
> On balance, I'm both impressed and disappointed with the complexity of the
> macports system to date.  For example, dependency resolution needs a lot of
> work during upgrades,

What do you mean, performance-wise?  If so, that's been vastly improved on
trunk, see

<http://trac.macports.org/ticket/18259>

> binary distributions are a great idea in the making
> (perhaps forever in the making),

Yes, binaries is a definitely-wanted feature, but there are issues ranging
from dealing with variants (should binaries for each possible variant
combination be provided, some grouping just for binary support?), to the
question of where do these get built?  Some have suggested the same people
who update the port itself, but are all of our machines as clean for such
uses (eg, some ports may link against bits which are not declared as
dependencies).  Then there's the question of actual implementation...

> and the whole issue of dependency on
> variants is a massive conference debate.

Seeing as how variant dependencies is one of the oldest tickets we have
(#126), it's obviously wanted & needed, but will require some definite work
throughout base; so again, an implementation issue, and a big one in this
case.

[...]
> Perhaps one way to reduce the confusion is to
> create branches in the port tree for each major OSX release and platform
> (PowerPC, intel, iphone; what's next?).

Having multiple branches for the ports themselves has been brought up
before, but is unworkable in today's MacPorts because we have so few people
to begin with.  We have a bit more than 5600 ports and half of those are
unmaintained, so doubling the number of Portfiles to maintain would just be
more burdensome.  Also, for breaking them out per OS release/platform, how
many of the people maintaining those 2300 ports has access to both Intel and
PowerPC on at least 10.4 and 10.5?

A build server/farm would help, but who's going to host it?  I don't believe
that's one of the services MacOSForge provides.

Bryan

[...]
> 
> Take care, Darren