Compiling a port statically

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 6, 2020, at 18:40, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:

> I was thinking about port mpkg or port mdmg as an alternative, but since it looks like that may put its files in the same place as the MacPorts installation on which it was created does, it's not practical for anything except transferring e.g. a small set of ports (and with the m... variants, those that they depend on) to another machine (same OS, or should later OS probably work too, DEPENDING on quirks of components?) to another system on which there won't be a complete MacPorts installation. Am I right about that?  (see below for an OMG all the dependencies! listing of the xar mpkg file)

port pkg/dmg/mpkg/mdmg are a way to create macOS installer packages. Yes, they install to the same place that the ports would install, so please do not use port pkg/dmg/mpkg/mdmg if your prefix is /opt/local if you intend to distribute it to others; instead, build MacPorts in another prefix corresponding to your project name, such as /opt/myproject.

Ports built on one OS version very likely will work on subsequent OS versions but possibly without optional features that only became available on that new OS version.


> And to Make It Worse, I suspect ffmpeg may build with optimizations that may be dependent on specific hardware (CPU instruction set extensions, etc), so even aside from the possible license issues, it may not be particularly portable anyway.

If so, we should fix that.