Hi and welcome to the MacPorts community! On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 01:37:39AM -0300, Marcelo Galvão Póvoa wrote: > I think binary packages could benefit from some other useful perks > such as: prior disk space requirement information and being able to > query port contents such as in [1].
That sounds good and would be nice to have. Note that querying port contents will only work for the configurations our buildbots actually build, i.e. for the default variants only. However, having partial information is better than having no information whatsoever, I guess ;) > - Do I need prior knowledge of Tcl to be able to tackle this project? > I have some experience with bash script. >From my own experience as a GSoC student in 2011 I know that you can manage without prior knowledge on Tcl. I'd suggest the Tcl Tutorial: http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/tutorial/tcltutorial.html > - Why some ports are not available as binary packages? Are there > portability issues in compiling these? There are multiple reasons why a port might not be available as binary: - First, binary downloads are only used when some configuration variables are still at their default, e.g. prefix=/opt/local, applications_dir=/Applications/MacPorts. - Second, we only build the default variants of every port. Building every possible combination of variants would probably be computationally expensive. We're trying to gather statistical data to build popular variants, but that work hasn't been deployed yet. - Third, while building might work, licenses don't always permit us to distribute the binaries we build. For the same reason, ports that do not specify their license aren't distributed (which doesn't mean they aren't built on the buildbots, though) > - I didn't find much information about the current status of the > binary building system, could someone elaborate on that? Specifically, > which other tasks does this project expect besides those mentioned in > the wiki? I'm not very familiar with the binary build system. Maybe somebody else on this list has some insight into this? -- Clemens Lang _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
