On Jan 6, 2010, at 12:33, Scott Haneda wrote:
> I posted a little MAMP tutorial the other day. While I think it is valuable
> to the end user, I also think it is not going to be received well by MP in
> general, as they are going to want to follow a stricter set of steps than the
> direction I went in. I took a lot of liberties just to get it all working.
>
> I want to start in a different way, which would be to write new data for each
> respective port, which in the end, could be chained together to provide a
> user with the steps needed to get MAMP up and running.
>
> So I will start with MySql, which in my opinion, is one of the harder ones to
> get running on MacPorts. This is because MacPorts sort of stops at the
> install part. It does a fine job at that. However, there are ui messages
> that ask the user to do things that either do not work, are pointing to files
> I can not find, or in general, cause confusion.
If there are wrong or incomplete ui_msgs please file tickets so I can fix them.
> Before I outline those issues, I wanted to bring up the very first thing I
> was thinking.
>
> Why is there a mysql plain and mysql server version?
> This seems to come up often enough that it is worth discussion.
>
> The only difference I see is the startup item, is that correct? If that is
> the case, I do not see any reason why the port is not just "mysql5". It
> would install the launchd or startup item, and be in a disabled state.
>
> The user gets mysql, if they want to turn it into a server, they can run one
> command to do so. This could be a ui message. I do not think that having
> one extra small file on the system is a huge deal, for removing a good deal
> of confusion. How many times has someone posted that they just installed
> mysql, to learn they need to go back and install mysql5-server?
>
> Is this a way off base suggestion? It seems so much simpler, just merge the
> two ports into one, if a user wants it to be a server, run the single command
> to enable the startup of it.
mysql5 installs the client and server software. mysql5-server installs the
launchd plist and the directories a server would need. This mirrors the
postgresql ports.
There used to just be a mysql5 port with a +server variant, but this was awful
because when installed as a dependency, or by someone who didn't yet understand
variants, the port would be installed without the server launchd plist, and to
get it, the user would have to recompile all of mysql5, which wasted a lot of
time. *This* came up all the time for years and was worth discussion and
resulted in what we have now.
You might think just having a mysql5 port and making it always install the
launchd plist would be better. But remember that it's not just the launchd
plist: it's also the directories, which need to be owned by the mysql user. The
user might be installing in a non-root prefix, might only need the client
portion, and would not have permission to install the launchd plist nor to set
the ownership of directories to a system user. Such a user could work around
the launchd plist issue by setting startupitem_type to none in macports.conf,
but the port would still have to know not to install the directories. Can a
port query the startupitem type the user requested? If so, the port could do so
and omit installing the server directories if ${startupitem.type} is none. In
the end, however, you must admit this reduces transparency: Before, it was
clear if you installed "mysql5 +server" you got a server, if you installed
"mysql5" you didn't. Currently, if you install "mysql5-server" you g
et a server, if you just install "mysql5" you don't. But if we change the port
to infer things based on the startupitem type, and you look at "port installed"
and see "mysql5", you don't know whether it has server parts or not. I suppose
(and I apologize, I'm thinking this through as I'm typing) the
startupitem.type-based detection could lead to the port auto-selecting (or not)
(using default_variants) the +server variant. Hmm..... You know, that might
work.
If we're thinking of removing mysql5-server, we should have similar thoughts
about the postgresql and other ports that do this, and also about removing the
+no_startupitem variant from ports like apache2, since a user who wants to
install a purely server software like apache without a launchd plist is a)
strange and apparently running with diminished privileges, and therefore b)
must logically want the same for all other ports as well, and c) can achieve
this in macports.conf.
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