On Jul 5, 2007, at 11:38 AM, James Berry wrote:
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
Not sure if it's necessary as I believe I already stated my position
clearly, but I'll do it here again just to be safe. I believe James'
comments above echo my position to a large extent, even though he
states his somewhat more firmly and stricter. Maybe in the long term
we can reach a middle point somewhere, but in a nutshell we agree
fully on what the project course will be.
The extra mile I'm willing to go and which I could negotiate for is
keeping support for other platforms in as long as there are active
interests maintaining it, just as there are now, and as long as they
work hard to keep the compatibility code from becoming the
development impacting roadblock James talks about above.
As long as those two points are met I don't see a problem in keeping
support for other platforms in, this is an open source project after
all and we do embrace these ideals!
Hope MacPorts on FreeBSD rocks as much as on Mac OS X, keep up the
good work Anders!
Regards,...
-jmpp
_______________________________________________
macports-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
