On 8/4/2020 12:52 PM, Ruben Di Battista wrote:
One of the reasons I chose Macports for is the fact it builds its own tree from source and it ships basically open source only software.
I think there have been cases where MacPorts' preference/insistence on building from source, even when prebuilt binaries are available, may have been excessive and/or eventually had negative consequences. One set of examples is the various ports for Java libraries, many of which are now outdated or broken. They all appear to be open source, but many also have a prebuilt non-architecture-specific binary (.jar file) readily available. Many of these ports no longer build from source with newer JDK versions (even for some up-to-date ports), but the prebuilt binaries for these ports often still work with newer Java runtime versions. Had these ports used the upstream binary instead of building from source, I wonder if fewer of them would be broken, and that they would've actually been easier to keep updated and working.
