I love computers for that they do the stupid stuff for me better than I could do myself. Of course, I under- stand that I should not update portfiles between fetching and building, but I am almost sure that I would not get it right to prefetch sources manually for lets say tomcat5. As far as I understand, you are not done when asking "port deps tomcat5" and copying the dependencies list. I bet I would forget to get me the sources of e.g. jakarta-bcel which is not listed for tomcat5 but which is used by mx4j that in turn is a dependency of tomcat5. Probably my build would fail shortly because of such a stupid thing that I might have overseen, just because I am human. And it is tedious, to check this manually.
IMHO, the pre-fetch will works OK if the deps are correctly 'calculated'. Also, prefetch does not work i.e. die if certain packages (nessus, metasploit, etc) requires registrations.
That said, it still remains second to the first idea of mel who started this thread, to implement a dry run feature. Maybe, dry run would just be half of the implementation of prefetch.
Due to the reason above, I'd prefer the the dry run feature to be implemented first, because I think in the long run it will help to improve port's variants feature. --mel _______________________________________________ macports-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
