On Oct 26, 2007, at 1:56 PM, paul beard wrote:

On 10/25/07, Daniel J. Luke <dluke@geeklair.net> wrote:
On Oct 24, 2007, at 10:11 PM, James Sumners wrote:
> Why doesn't MacPorts supply binary packages?

No one has worked on it recently.

If you're interested, I'm sure we would be interested in your help.

Is there a status document that addresses where things stand on efforts like this? I haven't been all that successful at building packages within port (port pkg foo where foo is something i would rather not build again on a second machine). I think I may have resorted to taking the output of "port contents" and wrapping it in a tar or zip command, but that doesn't add any of the magic of receipts and the rest of the stuff that makes a ports system worth using.

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.

All of this may sound a bit daunting and discouraging, but trust me that that's not my intent. Packaging is one of my personal top goals, but I need to explain that we want to do them right and that's not a simple and quick thing. Also, our our developer force is still unfortunately small and we just don't get enough leg power to move as fast as we'd like. If anyone is interested in helping to materialize this goal sooner than later please do step up, but be warned that we're not at the stage of furnishing the house, but actually looking into the design of the construction as we lay out the foundations.