On 2011-9-13 01:17 , Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On Sep 12, 2011, at 09:34, Anders F Björklund wrote:
>> The archives could be extended to packages with a few extra metadata, at 
>> least there's nothing fundamentally different from the MacPorts "archives" 
>> and the FreeBSD "packages" in terms of format. But there seems to be little 
>> reason to keep "supporting" RPM if it is never going to be used directly 
>> anyway. That goes for both MacPorts and FreeBSD... Stick with them old 
>> tarballs.
> 
> I don't know why MacPorts contains any rpm code or what it was supposed to be 
> useful for.

"Why not?" There was a lot of talk back in the OpenDarwin days about
Apple adopting a better format than .pkg, and rpm was one of the
candidates suggested.

See e.g. <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.opendarwin.darwinports/2012>.

There was also the whole DPLight thing,
<http://web.archive.org/web/20070216155828/http://opendarwin.org/projects/dplight/>.

>> Just saying that if you're going to call the archives packages, might as 
>> well simplify things ?
> 
> Again I think it's only ever not simple when you talk about it. :) It's 
> already simple for me. I just don't see the distinctions you make between 
> archives and packages. I'll use either word at random depending on what pops 
> into my head first.

Packages contain all the metadata needed for a package manager (which is
much simpler than a ports system) to install them and track
dependencies, without needing the system that was used to build the
source. Archives don't offer that. Simple.

- Josh
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