Panther tickets

[Anders F Björklund]

David Osguthorpe wrote:
> On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 03:43:19AM -0600, Emmanuel Hainry wrote:
>> You should also drop bugfixing for anything not macosx (linux, bsd,
>> puredarwin). Jordan's plan would mean you can remove a lot of code  
>> from
>> base: why are there different gcc default, different x11prefix? Why
>> should you care that some people use powerpc architectures, their
>> machines should already be dead (mine is) so only supporting the next
>> macosx release should be okay.

Only supporting Snow Leopard seems a bit narrow, in terms of  
platforms...

I think it would make sense to keep the +puredarwin variant now that
puredarwin.org are using it to provide software for the Darwin 9 OS ?
Not supporting the previous releases (Darwin 7.0 and Darwin 8.0) seems
reasonable, even though MacPorts still did work OK on those as well.

Support for FreeBSD was revived in order to have a free OS platform to
test it on, and then GNU/Linux was added just to test the portability.
Neither of those are very serious, in terms of actual available ports,
even they do come in handy some times for mirroring and other purposes.

But neither (pure/bsd/gnu) is "supported" like Mac OS X is, of course.

> I really get concerned when I see statements like this - so much  
> that I start
> thinking maybe forking macports to eg. linuxports is needed - or  
> maybe back
> to darwinports
...
> One if the things that I like about Darwinports/Macports was the  
> encapsulation of the
> building of open source projects - I do a lot of downloading  
> software and adding my own
> personalizations and Ive found the Portfile approach relatively  
> easy to adapt for this
> (yes Ive made my own SPEC files for rpms and Portfiles seemed much  
> simpler to the Fink
> Makefiles which Ive looked at and what Ive seen of dpkgs so far for  
> Ubuntu doesnt seem easy)
> so Im seriously thinking about using "LinuxPorts" on the Linux side  
> to control
> software I might download and add changes to
...
> By keeping to very basic generic Unix tools/options/commands you  
> can solve the above
> problems and keep Darwinports/Macports working for as many systems  
> as possible


It should be _easier_ to run MacPorts on other platforms now that the
Foundation requirement (e.g. GNUstep) has been made optional instead ?

Ironically it was the Tcl requirement that was causing the problems on
newer Linux, since it doesn't always come with the threaded capability
that MacPorts requires (for instance Fedora's tcl package doesn't work),
even if for instance mtree and gnustep weren't normally available  
either.

There are several things, like user creation or service starting/ 
stopping,
that needs porting to other operating systems if it should be usable  
there.
And probably a large number of ports also would need some minor  
patching or
adjustments before they would run on other platforms, due to  
hardcoding Mac.

But it should still be "possible" to install MP 1.7 on Linux, even if  
there
were no packages* made for it - due to the lack of cross-platform  
interest...

--anders


* Like the ones for MP 1.6: http://trac.macports.org/browser/users/ 
afb/GA
   Packages were available for FreeBSD (tbz), Fedora (rpm) and Ubuntu  
(deb)