I see the macports.conf lets you configure rsync_dir, the path of the tarball that selfupdate uses to fetch the base files. Is it possible to distribute the master branch, or a beta branch, on the mirrors so selfupdate could keep you up to date on those releases instead? Something like how Chrome has its beta and canary channels?
This isn't something we could just flip a switch to enable, but it would certainly be possible to implement with some work. One thing that would need to be figured out is how to indicate to clients that an update is needed.
I don't know how much demand there is for such a feature. There may be significant overlap between people who are prepared to deal with things being broken and those who are comfortable installing from a git branch. But certainly it would be nice if there was more testing of betas.
BTW, downloading the base sources via rsync is now usually only a fall-back, used if doing it via HTTP fails. The relevant macports.conf settings for HTTP selfupdate are release_version_urls and release_urls.
- Josh
