On May 8, 2007, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
Such a format does exist: It's called a .pkg file and you interact with them every time you install an Apple software update. However, I don't think there's any functionality in MacPorts to create or use package files.
That's not correct: the creation of binary packages was indeed one of the priorities of the orginal DarwinPorts project! Besides the .pkg format, MacPorts supports (nowadays, theoretically) the creation of .dpkg and RPM packages and the automatic building of .dmg disk images. In better times, there was even a repository (http:// packages.opendarwin.org) which was populated by running the script base/portmgr/buildall.sh and an experimental but usable project by Ole Guldberg Jensen, DPLight, which patched DarwinPorts to support directly the RPM registry (http://www.opendarwin.org/projects/dplight/): mounting the repositories via WebDAV was a simple but perfect solution not only for the final users. The most serious issue, however, was the lack of an official uninstaller which should be currently -- paradoxically -- one of the first priority of the MacPorts project, IMHO. There are some important changes coming with Leopard: it has already been announced the use of XAR as the new binary format (http://www.nabble.com/xar-in-Mac-OS-X-t2081148.html) as well as the support for "automatic Internet download" and "new receipt tools" (http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/sessions/index.html). Nothing more has been divulged outside the NDA but it is clear that much work will be required in order to interact with the new system receipt database and to implement some form of reference counting that Mac OS X unfortunately doesn't yet manage by itself.