Re: Toward a MacPorts port that tracks 0.7.9

Hi Craig

Thank you for putting forward a maintainer's perspective on the role of
MacPorts. I agree that trying to create a portfile is the wrong way to go,
when my main goal is experimenting with the system. I will try your
suggestion about avoiding parallel execution next time I build it.

You are correct that there are few 'compulsory' dependencies for 0.7.3_3
and 0.7.9 but it seems to me that there are now optional dependencies, such
as for drawing graphics and creating a GUI. These are the areas that I hope
to explore in due course.

Thank you also for maintaining the gforth portfile and for your kind words.

Marv





On Mon, 3 Feb 2025 at 14:31, Craig Treleaven <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Feb 3, 2025, at 4:10 AM, Marvin Littlewood <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
> I recognise that there are flatpak and snap distributions for Fedora,
> Ubuntu and homebrew for the Mac, so I wondered what it would take to crea=
te
> a portfile. Crucial to that idea is being able to build the latest tarbal=
l,
> so I recorded my experiences.
>
> Is everyone happy for me to continue on this path for the moment? (I have
> a lot to learn about how MacPorts works and whether building on a client
> machine is a viable approach, so I am uncertain as how this idea will tur=
n
> out.)
>
>
> Hi:
>
> Are you saying that you want to be able to build development versions of
> gforth on your Mac so you can identify bugs and help the developers?  If
> so, MacPorts isn=E2=80=99t particularly suited for such work.  MacPorts i=
s designed
> to distribute stable, tested, released software.
>
> So doing the builds outside of MacPorts is going to be your best choice.
> Likely by cloning the git repo and doing a git pull prior to building.  O=
f
> course, you can use the libraries installed via MacPorts.  That=E2=80=99s=
 just
> libffi and libtool, right?  Or has something changed?
>
> BTW, your earlier email mentioned a segmentation fault while building
> gforth.  In MacPorts, we disabled parallel builds for gforth=E2=80=94it w=
as a very
> long time ago but I think this was the symptom.  You might try issuing th=
e
> make command with "-j 1=E2=80=9D.  Since gforth isn=E2=80=99t a long buil=
d, this isn=E2=80=99t too
> much of a hardship.
>
> Whenever a new stable version of gforth is released, it should be pretty
> trivial to update MacPorts.  Even if I=E2=80=99m not involved, you just n=
eed to
> file a bug in the MacPorts Trac system and one of the maintainers will
> eventually deal with it.  Even better is to submit a pull request to
> MacPorts on GitHub.  They tend to be dealt with very quickly.
>
> HTH,
>
> Craig
>
>