Ports & Pkg Mgr

[David Leimbach]

On Sep 27, 2003, at 11:03 PM, James Frazer wrote:

A C callable API -- hmm -- okay so how does this relate to their 
current TCL code?  I haven't actually played with dports first-hand so 
I'm still ignorant of its ways.

The idea is it shouldn't interfere with the current Portfile syntax 
which was always secretly TCL :).  Of course ideas are in flux right 
now.

Interesting.  Right, so do you know what the status for darwin ports 
on non-darwin OS's is?  I know someone had it working on FreeBSD.

I don't actually... Yes people had it working on different BSD's and 
even Linux I think as well as Solaris.

Okay here is a question for you -- Is the dports system in a mature 
enough state that one should spend any significant amount of 
time/effort writing portfiles for it?  (without something changing 
that would make them all obsolete).  I understand that dports will 
never acquire full acceptance until enough portfiles are written for 
it.

We have 580+ ports already and I would say that's mostly just OS X 
users and Darwin users.  People are currently  working on making the 
part of
darwinports that are platform specific more easily expressed as such 
without being too invasive.

DragonflyBSD seemed more likely to adopt dports [over the other BSDs] 
because they are a smaller group and can do pretty much whatever they 
want -- hence my interest and initial inquiry here.  Not having a Mac 
and being a noname in FreeBSD-land has kept me at a distance from 
current efforts to do anything with dports.





-James