On Jul 5, 2007, at 12:12 AM, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:
If it's just crazy old me, I can patch in here locally.
I'm not a die-hard FreeBSD fan, I just find the whole
Mac lock-in part a bit scary and want to stay portable...
I understand portability and love it and embrace it (this is ports
tree of open source software after all, and I dedicate quite a bit
of time to it ;-), so I understand your concern. But in this
particular case I do have to ask: what does portability buy not
only the MacPorts project... but MacPorts users themselves? Are
they really gonna fire up a FreeBSD box, remove its native (and
much larger) ports tree and use MacPorts? I guess I just don't
understand the motivation for that (maybe I haven't used FreeBSD's
ports tree enough, if you know what I mean ;-). But if there is an
audience out there wanting to do exactly that, then by all means!
Still, however, Mac OS X is by far our main focus and I want to
safeguard that. So I guess I could simply sum-up my position as
follows: "whatever you want, as long as it doesn't hurt our Mac OS
X focus in any way.... and also as long as it's not crack
smoking!" ;-) And that goes for other platforms too, not just
FreeBSD (someone using MacPorts on Linux? ;-)
So, now to everybody.... any objections to merging FreeBSD support
into release_1_5? James and Markus? You cool? going once.... going
twice.... ;-)
I don't have any problems with some relatively minor patches required
to support use of MacPorts in other environments, such as FreeBSD. A
couple of points though:
- I might change my mind of the extent of such patches began to
impact the maintainability of the MacPorts base code.
- There may be times when some of the things we do to MacPorts may
not be easily supportable on other OS's. One example being that I'd
like to make a bunch of new changes to Startupitem support sometime
around the leopard release (when we can finally _assume_ launchd
support) that may not be so easy to replicate on other OS's. Given
MacPorts charter as a Mac system, I'm not going to let the
compatibility with other OS's stand in the way of adding support for
Mac-only features.
James
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