Re: hosting an internal macports server with binaries
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.
Guido Soranzio wrote:
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.
The ideal would be if I could do a separate MacPorts install on some box, installing and bulding all the packages I wanted, and then point any other box to it and say "give me all of that", and not have to rebuild everything every single time. It's not that bad on a quad xeon mac pro but on even and old G5 imac it takes a LONG time to build anything. Also the ability to add my own ports files would also help but I'm guessing that that is already possible.
participants (2)
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Guido Soranzio
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Rick Gigger