Juan Manuel Palacios <jmpp@macports.org> on Monday, July 9, 2007 at 11:54 PM -0800 wrote:
2) Even though still not complete, extensive work on the generation of rpm's off MacPorts Portfiles has pushed forward our ability to generate real binary packages, improving both the building of the rpm tool itself on Mac OS X and the "rpm" MacPorts target (renamed from "rpmpackage") that creates the corresponding rpm files/packages. These packages still need to be generated by users off their own MacPorts installations ("port rpm <port>"), and flawless functionality for each of them is still not guaranteed, unfortunately. For instance, one long standing shortcoming still with us is that rpm installed software (even if the package is generated through MacPorts) is separate from MacPorts installed software, they are still two different universes that don't talk to each other even if installed into the same /opt/local prefix. However, strong developer momentum on the packaging front raises our hope that the goal of providing fully working and ironed out binary packages will be reached eventually!
I am progressing on the new Guide. I mispoke when I called the new Guide "minimalist", because that implies stuff will be left out. I only intended to streamline and rewrite it (some explanations were verbose and redundant) but leave no material out. I just added all the sections that I think need to be in it and I inserted the contents of "MacPorts Internals" stuff from the old guide too. Shouldn't be long now that all the data will be mined from the old guide. Not that the work is over since improvments will still be needed, but at least we can look forward to those rather than looking backwards and trying to capture what used to be. http://homepage.mac.com/duling/macports/guide.html Comments still welcome on the Guide so far. It needs some color css work and other css formatting, but I'm focusing on content and readability. I don't feel competant to write Section 7, "Packaging Ports into Binaries". Can anyone who understands the packaging process throw some text at me on this topic? Doesn't have to be much or pretty, I can rewrite it but I just something more or less technically accurate to start with. Or point me to a similar section in another package manager if that is possible. I'm just not that familiar with the whole topic and the manpage doesn't say that much. Mark