Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
This topic was, in any case, hashed out rather thoroughly back when the project changed its name from DarwinPorts to MacPorts. GIven the plethora of projects already devoted to multi-platform ports collections (portage, pkgsrc, etc) and the relative shortage of contributors just on one platform (MacOSX), it was decided to focus on providing the best possible experience for MacOSX, anything else being considered a distraction.
MacPorts is still reasonably portable, it's just that it makes more sense to try it with living platforms (like FreeBSD or GNU/Linux) for portability purposes than to try it with dead ones like Darwin OS - at least to me. If one wanted to use for instance Darwin 8.0.1 for some reason, then one could use an archive version of DarwinPorts (like 1.2 that I used) to aid in that archeological excavation - you probably wouldn't need MacPorts 1.6 The project doesn't seem to have decided yet whether it wants to provide the best possible Mac OS X experience, or whether it wants to e.g. provide its own bootstrap versions of all the required system libraries and binaries ? So currently other operating systems are tolerated, as long as they a) provide the necessary requirements, such as Tcl and Foundation and b) don't get in the way of the Mac development, and the platform variants should handle that. Somehow I have the nagging feeling that a pure "Mac" Ports would be more gooey and binary, but that's just me... --anders