Port install never uses packages, always compiles from source - why?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 10 Apr 2020, Ken Cunningham wrote:

> The prebuilt ports on the buildbot are not building their ports to go 
> into /Applications, so therefore they don’t match your setup — so you 
> can’t use them (even though many would be OK, it’s an all-or-nothing 
> thing.

This sort of thing comes up on this list all the time.  One thing that 
I've learned (thanks to people like Ryan and you etc) is to *never* touch 
MacPorts unless you are aware of the consequences.  It's not that it's 
fragile -- far from it -- it's just that there are few user-serviceable 
parts inside.

Now, I'm also a FreeBSD user; do I touch their ports system?  Nope, 
despite (or perhaps because of) my long experience with all sorts of 
versions of Unix; I know my limitations...

The only bits that are more or less available to end-users are the 
locations of the archive sites (being an Aussie I use Aarnet) and the 
build variants etc.

-- Dave