Michael <gmichaelt@gmail.com> writes:
There should be a bit more specificity about the assumptions made at your end, or the scope of what interests you. 10.3, implicitly does (at the moment), else there wouldn't be a version specific to it available. But there's a forgotten ignorance at play when macports.org sternly refers to installing XCode 2.4.x, which, it turns out, requires 10.4.2 or higher. One hand should know what the other is doing. Or phrase things in less absolute terms e.g. "ideally,...", etc.. I still wonder whether various parts of the latter version of XCode (e.g. the X11 SDK) can be installed over that version supplied with XC 1.5...
This describes a perfect world. In this one even the deep pockets puts less effort into products towards the end of their life cycles. The document you are referring to was only recently made, so the top priority for docs was our largest installed base. Now the top priority is completion of a comprehensive documentation (the new guide) , which happens to be common to all platforms. The news docs have been progressing steadily and may be mostly feature complete fairly soon. At that time tweaking them so they document 10.3 would be fine, though it may require some contributions from people still on 10.3 and that may not happen. But spending time trying to do it now would be negligent since it would make most of our users wait to have even feature completed rough documentation for a few users. If this weren't a volunteer projects priorities could be very different, but in fact they often aren't.
Yes, the install docs don't cover 10.3.
If you keep a last-but-one version (1.4, from what I can see at the moment), is it so hard to archive complete prior versions - docs and all - and make them available on a yer-on-yer-own basis?
When we get docs that are even roughly feature complete that would be possible, but the fact is (at least in my opinion) that the Mac community is very, very agressive about upgrading. And I think this is a departure from the communities surrounding the other Unices. We also don't support intalling previous versions of ports and such for similar reasons I think. Our community is different than the others. I like the fact that our community spends more time on new stuff than old, and I happen to think this is a weakness of some of the other Unix communities. That's why our ports tree tend to have newer ports than the others, the reason I came to MacPorts in the first place. All these things supply context to be considered when one says how things "should" be. To perform that "should" requires not doing some things we are doing now. So "should" requires votes behind it before it carries any weight. :)
A single locus of info would be a great improvement all around - ideally on a single site, but at least something that's been vetted by the same set of eyeballs, or managed, in toto, by one person or group with a stylesheet in mind!
Check. The new guide is vetted by one group and has a single CSS stylesheet. The InstallingMacPorts Wiki page is actually unnceccessary now, but I'm waiting to see how we rearrange our web site. Or if that takes too long I'll delete the Wiki page and replace it with a link to the new guide that now contains all the information right at the top.
Metastasizing FAQs don't help in an already complicated, detail-fussy matter. I'm hoping the info at the link above will eventually be everywhere, or the only "there".
All true. I don't like the current FAQs either. I hope many parts may be also deleted after the new guide is done, and the few remaining can be reformatted and clarified. After that, having a different look and feel for the FAQ is not a bad thing because people should know they are not reading official docs. So in the main, I think we'll get down to one guide, one FAQ on the Wiki, some news related stuff on the Wiki, and very little else.
I'm heartened to see that the above link begins with a description of the 'what it is' variety - something that's very difficult to find, ironically, on the macports.org site.
I think the "what it is" type of information is lacking in the whole Unix app world in general. I think it is fairly rare actually. And we know the MacPorts site needs work badly and we're actively seeking those who can redesign it. For free, of course, so it limits the prospective candidates a bit. :) Mark