Why doesn't macports install prebuild packages? / give Linux another try

[Joshua Root]

On 2009-12-1 03:03, Vlado Plaga wrote:
> As today's mail from Joshua shows, there are just not enough
> contributions to MacPorts to even think of regular binary releases -
> especially if we'd like to have them for two or three versions of MacOS
> (10.4 to 10.6), with all their different architectures (PPC, i386,
> AMD64...). If I'm not mistaken binaries need "releases" (like Ubuntu
> offers them twice a year), or at least the basic libraries must not
> change versions for a considerable time, so that installed programs
> depending on them don't break.

That's an orthogonal problem which affects source-based distributions as
well. Gentoo solves it with revdep-rebuild, for example. Our solution so
far has been simply to rev bump affected ports when needed.

There's no reason binaries couldn't be updated whenever the ports they
are built from are updated. (The fact that we don't have a stable branch
for ports is yet another orthogonal issue...)

- Josh