stable vs. unstable ports?

[Shreevatsa R]

[Changing the topic from build systems and replying just to the
original question]

2009/3/22 Darren Weber <dweber at macports.org>:
>
> I've noticed problems during port upgrades.
>
> What is the general consensus on having a TAG for each port to indicate it's
> "success" status within the system?

There is already a low-tech way of doing this: see if any bugs have
been reported against the given port. :)
Chances are that if others have had problems with upgrades, they would
have (hopefully) filed a ticket against the port.
Checking this is very easy to do thanks to Rainer Müller's recently
implemented Trac report, e.g. use
http://trac.macports.org/report/16?PORT=python25
to see if there are any recent bugs with the python25 port that you care about.

> Is it possible to have a meta-port monitor that automatically tracks the
> status of each package install and reports that status back to a central
> repository to continuously flag the status of a port install.  A simple
> dichotomy of stable and unstable might suffice (Debian uses stable,
> unstable, and testing).  Perhaps the monitoring system could provide the
> data required to justify these port status levels.

Note that what Debian does is something quite a bit more: they have
entirely different *sets* of ports marked stable, testing, unstable
and users choose to install all their packages from the same set
("tree"). This is fine for Debian to do because they have enough
people, but it would not be a good idea for MacPorts: having to
maintain multiple sets of inter-compatible ports leads to too much
fragmentation and the situation might end up similar to that with
Fink: the stable ports work very well but are too outdated for most
purposes, the unstable ports are really unstable and *still* quite a
bit older than in MacPorts. Having only one current version of each
port, which everyone gets and reports bugs against etc. is one of
MacPorts's strengths.