Is there a well-defined way to do "bleeding edge" ports? Should there be one?

[Bill Cole]

I'm currently working on a OSS project (SpamAssassin) which is in a pre-release rush and which I ultimately test & deploy via MacPorts.

I'd *like* to be able to switch from the current supported release in MacPorts to a fresh build from a Subversion checkout without manually mimicking what MP does (in part because I'm not 100% confident that I am doing it right) so that I can do testing iteration in a more efficient and repeatable fashion. This would be a different level of 'reckless cowboy' beyond the '-devel' ports we already have here and there with prerelease software.

I expect that this does not exist (I can't find anything...) but that it could. MP would need to always do a fetch/checkout/update/pull from the source control repo (I presume it would need BOTH svn and git support) and require use of a secure transport to make trusting the code without tarball checksums reasonable.

Does anyone else like the idea of this? See a need? Hate it? Already have a private tool for this?

-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire