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 _______________________________________________ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-users