I forgot the icing on the cake: On Oct 27, 2007, at 6:20 PM, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:
Building (binary) *packages* (and not "archives" as produced by archivemode and as explained by Anders), is one of MacPorts topmost long term goals, but trust me when I say that doing them right is by far much much more difficult than it sounds:
1) putting together a clean build environment and off it creating reliable, traceable & reproducible builds of a particular port, it's "destroot". A lot of work on this front has gone into MacPorts lately (mainly Eugene Epimenov's "trace mode" improvements) but unfortunately we're still lacking some key functionality to call our software infrastructure "complete" (runtime actions logging and server side processing of the build logs, among other things). I've been very busy with our new website lately but do plan to devote some energy into this in the hopefully not too distant future.
2) Once the build product, the destroot, is done and considered reliable, packaging it into, say, an rpm and/or a deb package is a completely different topic, with its own intricacies and integration issues between MacPorts and the packaging format we still need to sort out.
3) Package distribution and install time dependency resolving (which is different from build time dependency resolving, what MacPorts currently has) is yet a new dimension we also need to tie into to do packages "the right way". Granted that modern package managers have a sizable bit of this work covered already, but that by no means guarantees that we'll be able to drive blindfolded once we enter that terrain. Again, not-trying-to-discourage-anyone-but-actually-setting-the- record-straight-to-explain-why-we're-taking-so-long-to-deliver- packages.... -jmpp