Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio Release 3.1.0rc0 now available; New Debian package repository

[Michael Dickens]

On Oct 16, 2007, at 1:25 PM, Johnathan Corgan wrote:
> I'm not very familiar with MacPorts.  What is the pain involved in
> getting things into the binary format it uses?

MacPorts, née DarwinPorts, is a script (acting much like dpkg,  
dselect, apt-get, synaptic, and so forth) that downloads the source  
code, applies patches, and then configures, builds, and installs the  
'port'.  MP is designed to work on Darwin 6 or newer, and OSX 10.3 or  
newer (and supports a few *BSD*s as well).  All of this done via  
'portfile' scripts that describe all of the properties for this  
particular 'port' (not XML, but still a text file that's parsed with  
keywords and values), such as what other ports this one depends upon,  
where to get the source file(s) and patches, version, portfile  
revision and help info, shell environment and commands to use to  
configure, build, and check the 'port', and so forth.  Installs  
include dependencies, so trying to install wxPython will first  
install wxWidgets (if not already installed), Python, and anything  
else needed by those.

There is no real pain, usually, since it's just compiling the  
sources.  It's mostly just time waiting around for everything to  
compile.  Sometimes there are options that are not provided by  
default, that have to be added to the portfile ... such as: I'm using  
Python 2.5 to get SVN/Trac running, but GNU Radio relies on the  
Framework install of Python (on OSX only, to get the GUI to display),  
which isn't provided by the portfile.  Thus I've hacked the portfile  
(and submitted the changes back to the MacPorts folks) to get the  
framework option to work (and it does, nicely; it's really a simple  
change to the portfile).

Because of the number of ports out there, and the number of  
developers trying to keep the ports reasonably up to date, sometimes  
conflicts arise between ports.  For example not too long ago when  
wxWidgets and wxPython were around 2.8.1, one developer updated the  
portfile for wxPython before the compatible version of wxWidgets was  
available, and thus broke the install for wxPython.  This mattered  
because there was only 1 portfile for wxWidgets, and another for  
wxPython; it is impossible to directly install from a previous  
portfile (you can go into their SVN repository, find the older  
portfile, download it, put it in the correct location, run  
'portindex', and then do the install ... but that's somewhat of a PITA).

I have a GNU Radio portfile for 3.0.3, which I will update for 3.1  
once it's released, and make available to anyone who wants it (here  
on the list) as well as try to get it added to the MacPorts portfile  
list. - MLD