Added: trunk/base/NEWS (0 => 31640)

--- trunk/base/NEWS	                        (rev 0)
+++ trunk/base/NEWS	2007-12-01 03:32:13 UTC (rev 31640)
@@ -0,0 +1,90 @@
+
+What's new:
+
+*) Revived and thoroughly refreshed web presence at http://www.macports.org/ , with more improvements still on the way;
+*) New project guide temporarily at http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/ ;
+
+
+Overview of Changes from MacPorts 1.5.2 to MacPorts 1.6.0:
+
+# For regular usage:
+
+*) Fixed the "upgrade" target of the port(1) command to properly handle installed versions beginning with letters;
+*) Improved the "variants" target of the port(1) command to behave like the "info" target to poll the requested Portfile directly
+    rather than the index for more up-to-date information, while also providing a --index flag for legacy behavior;
+*) Fixed a bug by which a user specific 'macports.conf' file would not be read;
+*) Tightened security by installing MacPorts in 0755 mode (no write permission for group and others) by default;
+*) Added 'none' as a possible option for supported types of startupitems scripts;
+*) Disabled readline support in interactive mode of the port(1) command by deafult;
+*) Fixed a bug by which the "variants" target of the port(1) command would spit out an error backtrace to the terminal when no match
+    was found for the requested port;
+
+# Individual port-building related improvements:
+
+*) Eugene Pimenov's GSoC2007 work on improving "trace mode" for the building of ports in clean environments,
+    http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/wiki/soc2007/epimenov ;
+*) Added 'bsdmake' and 'gnumake' defaults for building ports on the FreeBSD and Linux platforms;
+*) Added 'configureccache' and 'configuredistcc' configuration options to the main 'macports.conf' for distributed
+    builds (defaulting to no);
+*) Improved building of configure-based universal ports on Leopard;
+*) Fixed a bug by which the 'universal' variant would disappear if a 'macosx' variant was selected;
+*) Added a 'macosx_deployment_target' option to the main 'macports.conf' file for ports that benefit form this Mac OS X specific flag;
+*) Added a 'configurepipe' option to the main 'macports.conf' file for using pipes rather than intermediate files when compiling C/C++
+    based ports;
+
+
+# Packaging related improvements:
+
+*) Created pkg's no longer have /etc, /var/ or /tmp directories in them;
+*) Fixed a bug by which all .mpkg packages were missing their welcome page;
+*) Fixed a bug by which HTML contents were written as a pkg's Welcome.rtf file, causing it to not display at all;
+*) Made the homepage clickable in a pkg's welcoming screen;
+*) Added support lzma compression for archives;
+*) Improved pkg & dmg creation on Leopard, for both Intel and PowerPC platforms;
+*) Added an 'mdmg' target, for the creation of a dmg for a port and its dependencies;
+*) Dramatically improved performace of the port(1) command's Portfile level actions like "file", "dir", "work" and "url"
+
+
+# For Portfile writers:
+
+*) Added more compiler suites as options to the 'configure.compiler' Portfile option;
+*) Added 'configure.fflags' 'configure.fcflags' 'configure.f90flags' Portfile options for Fortran based ports;
+*) Added 'configure.javac' and 'configure.classpath' Portfile options for Java ports;
+*) Added 'configure.objc' 'configure.objcflags' Portfile options for Objective-C based ports;
+*) Added 'build.nice' and 'build.jobs' Portfile options for parallel builds and build prioritizing;
+*) Added 'startupitem.netchange' boolean flag Portfile option for generated startup scripts;
+*) Added a "lint" target to the port(1) command, for Portfile verification and beautification;
+*) Added Portfile group code for Python 3.0 based ports and deprecated the plain 'python' group code;
+*) Added generic GNU livecheck rules;
+*) The "x86" platform has been normalized as "i386";
+*) Added a 'use_parallel_build' Portfile option for declaring if a particular port can be built in paralel through make's -j flag,
+    defaulting to no;
+*) Added 'configure.awk', 'configure.bison', 'configure.pkg_config', 'configure.pkg_config_path' Portfile options to point to the
+    relevant programs/paths to use;
+*) Added a 'extract.mkdir' Portfile option to better deal with so-called "tar bombs";
+*) Added a 'configure.pipe' Portfile option for using pipes rather than intermediate files when compiling C/C++ based ports;
+
+
+# For MacPorts scripting:
+
+*) Moved the 'ui_isset' and 'global_option_isset' Tcl procedures for testing of the UI and global options to the macports1.0 API
+    sparing its clients from having to implement them;
+*) Improved defaults for implicit ui_prefix and ui_channels behaviour at the macports1.0 layer;
+
+
+# Miscellaenous:
+
+*) Added MacPorts-configure time checks for Mac OS X and Xcode versions and warnings for old versions;
+*) Added a 'user-agent' parameters to our libcurl based fetching of sources for sites that require a user agent;
+*) 'livecheck' regular expressions are now checked against each entry in the listed master_site in the Portfile;
+*) Fixed regexp in livecheck code to work when there is both a tag and a subdir in the mirror uri;
+*) Improved the integrated "daemondo" program to better handle the death of startupitem-based programs;
+*) Added a "--restart-wait=n" argument to the integrated "daemondo" program to control the number of seconds to wait during restart of
+    the process it is monitoring, defaulting to 3;
+*) Enabled building of our objc bridge against GNUStep on platforms other than Mac OS X;
+*) Added support for packing of MacPorts itself on FreeBSD and Fedora platforms;
+*) Added SourceForge.jp to our list of SourceForge based mirrors for sources fetching;
+*) Added http mirror sites for the postgresql mirrors list;
+*) Added the ftp://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/ mirror to the GNU mirrors list;
+*) Fixed a bug by which paths with embedded spaces would cause the "dp2mp-move" upgrade code to fail when trying to find user specific
+    'macports.conf' files;