At 8:45 AM -0700 5/18/15, David Evans wrote:
On 5/18/15 8:01 AM, Craig Treleaven wrote:
Background - So I was following a discussion on another site about
Apple's Aperture being replaced. Many people are looking for
alternatives and there has been essentially no mention of open
source alternatives (like DarkTable, LightZone or DigiKam). Most
of these folks are photographers and would never consider
installing MacPorts and XCode in order to get an application they
might otherwise find interesting.
1) How much work would it take to have a mode in MacPorts where it
only installs pre-compiled packages? Is the assumption that XCode
is present so deeply ingrained that Macports-base would have to be
extensively re-designed?
For example, I would think 'port search' would need to be modified
to only show the pre-compiled packages (available for that
platform) and somehow indicate that only the default variants are
available.
Perhaps a fork of Pallet could be so modified?
2) Are there a worthwhile number of packages that would then be
available? I know my own MythTV ports run into the OpenSSL
conflict and therefore aren't available as binaries. From
http://packages.macports.org/ it appears we don't have binary
packages for DarktTable or DigiKam (and no port of LightZone).
OTOH, someone posted some information several weeks ago explaining
how to determine if that licence conflict really applies or not.
(Involves inspecting library linkages, as I recall.) I get the
impression that our current policy is quite conservative and that a
number of packages (many?) may actually qualify for binary
distribution with some analysis and verification.
Have you looked at the various binary packaging targets available
with MacPorts?
mpkg or mdmg might provide a mechanism to do what you want. Just
would need a way to distribute the results providing the licensing
issues could be worked out.
See https://guide.macports.org/#using.binaries
I am intimately familiar with mpkg/mdmg -- I provide an all-in-one
installer for Myth[1]. For that, I use Parallels to maintain an
isolated prefix for building (and others for testing. It occurred to
me that the existing infrastructure of MacPorts provides _most_ of
what would be needed for delivering pre-built packages to
less-sophisticated users.
[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/macportsmythtvinstaller/
Craig
_______________________________________________
macports-dev mailing list
macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org
https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
