Greetings:
First, let me acknowledge, as it was pointed out to me recenly on
#opendarwin, that my efforts to build darwinports.com as a user-friendly
interface to the portfiles should have begun with a posting to this list
rather than an announcement that a site was done and running. Better late
than never, though, so this email to darwinports@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx will
hopefully serve as an introduction for those involved with the project who
aren't as active on IRC, as well as a query to figure out the best course
of action going forward.
For those new to the topic, darwinports.com is a web site that I built
over about a weekend in mysql and PHP that presents a nightly-updated CVS
repository of the portfiles in a manner that makes it easy to discover new
ports and read the details of old favorites. Darwinports.com is currently
online and can certainly use improvement. The site's structure certainly
isn't rocket science, and it isn't likely the best possible presentation
of the Portfiles, but I it is something that a novice user might find at
least mildly interesting.
The motivation for building the darwinports.com site was to do something
useful with the domain name (unlike darwinports.org for instance) and was
a way for me to learn css. Beyond that, it would be cool if it was useful
to the world at large, but I have no grandiose plans for it. Figuring out
how to give each portfile and category with a page for each domain name
was also a fun challenge for me. (databases.darwinports.com,
mysql.darwinports.com etc.)
It was brought up in IRC that the current official web site and its
integration with CVS and mailman already provides much (if not all?) of
the above functionalities. While that may be true, I think that there
remain a number of major impediments to mass-adoption of the ports system
and those are the sorts of challenges I had anticipated like for the site
to address.
The things that I'd like to see built (which obviously aren't in the
current official site) are:
1. email notification (versiontracker-style) for updates to
particular ports
2. threaded comments for each portfile
3. links that would download a portfile (and with a properly
configured mimetype?) launch a GUI ports installer app. The goal here
being to have compiled software as easy to install as drag and drop
applications are currently. For all I know this item overlaps what Apple
has in mind down the road with their package management stuff. (I've
learned over the years that no small company who competes with Apple lives
to tell the story.)
4. promotion of secure software deployment practices for the Mac
community at large (checking hashes, signed files etc.) You'd be suprised
(or maybe not) at the number of Mac users who have never heard of MD5 or
SHA1/2. I think it is a good thing to make clear what the hashing
algorithms do and making clear to them, how they are checked, etc.
5. freshports-style listing of recent important changes
Not sure what's next:
should I check in darwinports.com source so others can work on it
and leave it where it is?
scrap it all and header redirect to darwinports.opendarwin.org and
then start submitting patches to the current official web site? (rather
not do that as it would mean that my work has been a waste)
just keep hacking away on it, taking feature requests from you all
and have it be a fan site?
what organizational structure is there to opendarwin and would
they be interested in the domain and what I've built on it?
Hopefully this email will kick off a discussion about the best plan of
action so that any outcome will not suprise anyone and be beneficial to
the group as a whole. In closing, I have benefitted tremendously from the
ports system over the years (I still have a FreeBSD3.x book laying around
in my office) and hopefully I can make a genuinely positive contribution
to these efforts. Darwinports.com is really a "fan site" in tribute to
the port collection on OSX. It is NOT an effort to fork or take credit,
and if I thought that it was conducive to either, I would take it offline
immediately.
I am grateful for your goodwill and your patience as I learn the proper
ettiquette for collaborative online development (hopefully in the future,
not by trial and error).
Best regards,
Mat Caughron
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