macports without XCode

[Craig Treleaven]

At 2:11 PM +0000 11/7/12, Federico Calboli wrote:
>On 7 Nov 2012, at 14:06, Jeremy Lavergne <jeremy at lavergne.gotdns.org> wrote:
>
>>>  Which packages if I can ask?  because they might be packages that 
>>>I do not want nor need.
>>
>>  I grepped to find 148 packages using our xcode includes explicitly 
>>(xcode.*1\.0). There may be more that were manually built without 
>>using our PortGroup files.
>
>Unless these packages are essential to using macports, and thus 
>unavoidable, 148 packages are a trivial percentage of the packages 
>provided by macports.  Couldn't I just avoid them altogether?
>
>>
>>>  How so?  I would have imagined it's the CLT that make the 
>>>difference, after all they mast be installed for macports.
>>
>>  ...and Xcode must also be installed.
>>
>>  We do version detection using `xcodebuild -version` (see zlib for 
>>an example). We would need an alternative to this if it's not 
>>installed.
>
>That's fine, and as I said I accept the space penalty of having to 
>have Xcode, but I fail to see why the versioning could not be done 
>on clang or llvm (or whatever thing is in the CLT package that could 
>be used for this)

I believe support is a big issue.  It is hard enough for a port 
maintainer to test with multiple versions of XCode.  Expanding that 
to multiple versions of the command line tools would make it that 
much worse.  Requiring the full XCode install isn't a big burden for 
users.  Things might be different if Apple was charging a non-trivial 
amount of money for XCode.

Craig