On Nov 27, 2009, at 2:05 AM, Jasper Frumau wrote:
> I am not a base developer so for me this is hard to judge or comprehend, but
> is there not any open source code available used by other package managers or
> repositories that can be used to start a Mac Ports package manager project?
Sure. The question was always what package format to use. At first (~2002) we
discussed dpkg, but abandoned because IIRC at the time Debian preferred Apple
to not use it. We held out hope for apkg, a more advanced/suitable Apple
Package Format, but that didn't materialize. We've discussed on and off a
xar-based packaging format, but that, though a very nice idea, has still not
happened.
In the meantime, we implemented support for generating quite a few different
package formats in base very early on -- dpkg, rpm, pkg/mpkg.
If you install the dpkg or rpm ports, you can build packages from ports right
now. Example:
land...@max> sudo port dpkg dict
...
---> Creating dpkg for dict-1.9.7
land...@max> dpkg --info `port dir dict`/work/*.deb
new debian package, version 2.0.
size 69930 bytes: control archive= 434 bytes.
467 bytes, 10 lines control
Package: dict
Architecture: darwin-i386
Version: 1.9.7-1
Section: textproc
Maintainer: landonf
Installed-Size: 201
Description: Dictionary Server Protocol (RFC2229) client
The Dictionary Server Protocol (DICT) is a TCP transaction based
query/response protocol that allows a client to access dictionary definitions
from a set of natural language dictionary databases. dict(1) is a client which
can access DICT servers from the command line.
.
http://www.dict.org/
The same also works for 'rpm', and Apple 'pkg' and 'mpkg' targets.
Someone just needs to invest the time in implementing automated building of all
of the packages into a repository, ensuring that MacPorts meta-data is properly
included, and you could provide an package (apt-get, yum, macports 'archive',
...) binary repository.
If you look in base/portmgr/packaging, you'll actually find a number of scripts
that do most of this: - dpkgall.tcl
- mpkgall.tcl
- packageall.tcl
- rpmall.tcl
With some pragmatic decisions about a packaging format, hardware on which to
run builds (IIRC j...@apple has offered to donate this), and a bit of time, I'd
bet a sufficiently motivated developer (admittedly, not me) could have a binary
repository fairly operational within a couple weeks.
-landonf
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