platforms

[Rainer Müller]

On 2018-03-24 13:54, Jan Starý wrote:
> The 'platforms' field of a Portfile is currently
> both _required_ and _ignored_. By the Guide,
> 
> 	A list of the platforms on which the port has been tested.
> 	Required, but not interpreted in any way by the software
> 	at this time; it is purely informational for user
> Also, it is allowed to say .e.g. "freebsd" but not e.g. "openbsd".
> I propose that the 'platforms' field be no longer required
> if it is ignored, and if it stays, let it be a free form text,
> as opposed to a predefined definitive list of all unixes.

I see the list of possible values in the guide as examples and
non-exhaustive. The wording could be better, though.

> Better yet, drop it altogether. The fact that I tested on Solaris
> or Debian means nothing regarding the MP port. I have also tested
> it on darwin of course, but that goes without saying.

As the guide says, it is "informational" at the moment. In the past,
more people were using MacPorts on FreeBSD, therefore they added their
test results to the port.

I agree it could be optional for the common case of "platforms darwin"
without any specific requirements on the version.

> (What would be kinda useful is if it pointed to the actual _ports_
> on the other systems - often there are things we can learn, as they
> battle a lot of the same GNUisms etc. For example, the patch for opus
> https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/1217 is basically
> the OpenBSD patch for opus. So if opus 'platforms' pointed to
> http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/audio/opus/
> it would be usefull. Unlike now.)

If a specific patch was taken from another distribution, information
should be right in the patch file. Some ports are already using
"Upstream:" or "Upstream-Status:" header lines in the patches. There is
no formal format for MacPorts, but it was loosely adopted from
OpenEmbedded [1].

I do not want to keep a list of all other package managers providing
libopus. There is already repology for this [2].

Rainer

[1]
https://www.openembedded.org/wiki/Commit_Patch_Message_Guidelines#Patch_Header_Recommendations:_Upstream-Status
[2] https://repology.org/metapackage/opus/versions