Hi Craig Thank you for putting forward a maintainer's perspective on the role of MacPorts. I agree that trying to create a portfile is the wrong way to go, when my main goal is experimenting with the system. I will try your suggestion about avoiding parallel execution next time I build it.
You are correct that there are few 'compulsory' dependencies for 0.7.3_3 and 0.7.9 but it seems to me that there are now optional dependencies, such as for drawing graphics and creating a GUI. These are the areas that I hope to explore in due course. Thank you also for maintaining the gforth portfile and for your kind words. Marv On Mon, 3 Feb 2025 at 14:31, Craig Treleaven <ctrelea...@cogeco.ca> wrote: > On Feb 3, 2025, at 4:10 AM, Marvin Littlewood < > marvin.littlewood.426...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I recognise that there are flatpak and snap distributions for Fedora, > Ubuntu and homebrew for the Mac, so I wondered what it would take to create > a portfile. Crucial to that idea is being able to build the latest tarball, > so I recorded my experiences. > > Is everyone happy for me to continue on this path for the moment? (I have > a lot to learn about how MacPorts works and whether building on a client > machine is a viable approach, so I am uncertain as how this idea will turn > out.) > > > Hi: > > Are you saying that you want to be able to build development versions of > gforth on your Mac so you can identify bugs and help the developers? If > so, MacPorts isn’t particularly suited for such work. MacPorts is designed > to distribute stable, tested, released software. > > So doing the builds outside of MacPorts is going to be your best choice. > Likely by cloning the git repo and doing a git pull prior to building. Of > course, you can use the libraries installed via MacPorts. That’s just > libffi and libtool, right? Or has something changed? > > BTW, your earlier email mentioned a segmentation fault while building > gforth. In MacPorts, we disabled parallel builds for gforth—it was a very > long time ago but I think this was the symptom. You might try issuing the > make command with "-j 1”. Since gforth isn’t a long build, this isn’t too > much of a hardship. > > Whenever a new stable version of gforth is released, it should be pretty > trivial to update MacPorts. Even if I’m not involved, you just need to > file a bug in the MacPorts Trac system and one of the maintainers will > eventually deal with it. Even better is to submit a pull request to > MacPorts on GitHub. They tend to be dealt with very quickly. > > HTH, > > Craig > >
