On Nov 11, 2008, at 5:37 PM, Bryan Blackburn wrote:
On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 03:43:26PM -0800, Scott Haneda said:
[...]
Ahh nice, thanks. I am not entirely sure, you guys can be the
gauge of
this, but I feel my questions are not that out of the ordinary for
a new
port maker. I do look at the docs before I ask here, either I am a
bad
searcher in the docs, or the data is missing. Google tends to mostly
point the the tracker, so that is of little use.
If I wanted to start adding stuff like this to the docs, would you
agree
it is beneficial, or am I asking questions most people understand?
If you
do think it is beneficial, what is the best procedure for making
changes
and additions to the docs?
Personally, I'd love to hear your summary of how the guide didn't
cover
things you ran into. Many of us who know enough to be able to write
sections in there may not always remember what bits were missing
when first
learning (I wrote my first Portfile 5-6 years ago, so I definitely
don't
remember what the learning curve was like, not to mention Portfiles
look a
bit different now).
You hit the nail on the head. You would have a assp port file
working, in I bet, 30 minutes or better, whereas, even though I hack
around a bit here and there, after work, I am in this a week already.
I will be happy to write you a short summary. I think the basics of
it are that it was hard for me to know where to start. Also,
consider, people like me may want to add ports, but they get stuck on
two things, learning the ports commands, and learning tcl.
For starters, I think you need, and I still need, a outline of the
process. Simple outline, such as when you enter in `sudo port install
foo` the file is parsed, it sees the version, grabs it from the url,
stores it at this file location, runs this command, moves it to this
location, and finally, deletes whatever here and there, and ...
You get the idea. There is a large picture here that needs to be
understood, and that would get people started a lot faster. I just
learned the other day that all ports are installed in my system. I
had the notion that only a index of the ports were there, and I was
fetching them when I installed. This was just an assumption I made,
that was wrong. I then started wondering, what happens if the port
servers are down, how do you resolve that. Of course, it is not an
issue, but I think you can agree, that my assumption was not all that
off the mark. Probably influenced by how CPAN works, and Ports being
analogous to it to a degree.
Let me get this one working, by then I will be better educated to take
a step back and see where I had the most issues.
--
Scott
_______________________________________________
macports-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-users
