Compiling a port statically

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 6, 2020, at 15:52, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:

> I'm going to play devil's advocate on this and another post (with competing positions, so don't feel bad).
> 
> MacPorts knows the library dependencies of a port. While it does not now (AFAIK) record the specific versions of each used to build an installed port, in principle, it could; at which point it could (also in principle) determine whether any of them had changed, thus requiring a rebuild of the port that depended on them, even if its version hadn't changed.
> 
> That's NOT a feature request, or probably even a practical idea. But IMO, it does indicate that there are solutions such that the library ports would NOT have to be aware of what used them.

You are correct, MacPorts does not work like this today. And as an example of something for you to think about, and not something to which I'm asking for answer: how would the binaries that we distribute get rebuilt under this hypothetical scenario?