On May 17, 2007, at 6:37 AM, Chuck Remes wrote:
On May 17, 2007, at 1:14 AM, Boey Maun Suang wrote:
Hi Chuck and David,
On 17/05/2007, at 00:14, Chuck Remes wrote:
On May 16, 2007, at 8:59 AM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
Is there a compelling reason to use cvs HEAD for this port?
Yes. The upcoming 1.1.0 release can only be accessed from HEAD. Plus, this is the best way to make sure that, as the code reaches release status, it doesn't break under OSX. The other maintainer and I are keeping a close eye on things to make sure OSX remains a solidly supported target platform. As soon as 1.1.0 is officially released, we will update the Portfile to grab a tarball.
There is an older release (1.0.3) which could potentially be used, but it's a dead-end for support and functionality. All new development is focused on the 1.1.x releases.
In the interim, HEAD is safe. The project developers have a policy of not breaking the build so we are (somewhat) assured the port will function properly for folks. Again, this is temporary.
Is this sufficient?
My concern with tracking HEAD in a public portfile (which is, I believe, the primary stated reason for discouraging it) is to do with non-reproducibility of builds. I imagine that it would be much easier to diagnose a problem if we know exactly what was in the source files via a tag, rather than having to try to find out when exactly they installed the port (particularly if it's a bug that is important but whose cause gets obfuscated by later changes, though I don't know how likely that is). [snip]
Thanks for all the feedback. I'll take a look at introducing a date tag so we can get reproducible builds. Once I get that working, we'll just update the Portfile twice a month until the transcode developers put out the final release. I'll privately track their daily submissions to make sure they don't break OSX builds too badly. :-)
I have submitted a modified Portfile using a date tag for checkout. It compiles cleanly on both PPC and x86, so I think we're in good shape. Some please review and commit [1]. cr [1] http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/ticket/11933