Guido Soranzio wrote:
On May 8, 2007, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
Such a format does exist: It's called a .pkg file and you interact
with them every time you install an Apple software update. However, I
don't think there's any functionality in MacPorts to create or use
package files.
That's not correct: the creation of binary packages was indeed one of the
priorities of the orginal DarwinPorts project!
Besides the .pkg format, MacPorts supports (nowadays, theoretically)
the creation of .dpkg and RPM packages and the automatic building of .dmg
disk images.
In better times, there was even a repository
(http://packages.opendarwin.org)
which was populated by running the script base/portmgr/buildall.sh
and an experimental but usable project by Ole Guldberg Jensen, DPLight,
which patched DarwinPorts to support directly the RPM registry
(http://www.opendarwin.org/projects/dplight/): mounting the repositories
via WebDAV was a simple but perfect solution not only for the final users.
The most serious issue, however, was the lack of an official uninstaller
which should be currently -- paradoxically -- one of the first priority of
the MacPorts project, IMHO. There are some important changes coming with
Leopard: it has already been announced the use of XAR as the new binary
format (http://www.nabble.com/xar-in-Mac-OS-X-t2081148.html) as well as
the support for "automatic Internet download" and "new receipt tools"
(http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/sessions/index.html). Nothing more has
been divulged outside the NDA but it is clear that much work will be
required in order to interact with the new system receipt database and
to implement some form of reference counting that Mac OS X unfortunately
doesn't yet manage by itself.
The ideal would be if I could do a separate MacPorts install on some
box, installing and bulding all the packages I wanted, and then point
any other box to it and say "give me all of that", and not have to
rebuild everything every single time. It's not that bad on a quad xeon
mac pro but on even and old G5 imac it takes a LONG time to build anything.
Also the ability to add my own ports files would also help but I'm
guessing that that is already possible.
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