Why does Macports take FOREVER to create simple packages?

Question

Building from a source outside of macports is a breeze. Building with macports takes forever and seems to freeze os every so often. Is this typical behavior? Although this seems like a good os x packaging tool, if I have to go through this pain every time during each installation, I think I can do without it.

Answer 1

If you are running Intel Core 2 Duo, you can double the speed of your builds by changing the Macports configuration option located here:

/opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf

# Number of simultaneous make jobs (commands) to use when building ports buildmakejobs 2 

I kicked myself when I discovered this after I restored gcc;)

This option allows you to use both processors to create packages.

Answer 2

"freeze os"? Can you be more specific? What packages did you try to build on which version of OS X on which machine?

In my experience, MacPorts, as a rule, works correctly for almost any supported configuration, in my case from 256 MB of Pismo G3 (2000), running at 10.4, although the recent dual-core Intel iMac is at 10.5. However, you have to be patient: it can take a lot of time, especially if there are many dependent packages, which is one of the disadvantages of using a package manager such as MacPorts or Fink. The good news is that you usually have a much more controlled and reliable environment than if you yourself installed individual packages from the source code. And, if you haven't already done so, make sure you have updated the latest MacPorts: 1.8.0 has just been released and has some important improvements, including better support for universal assemblies.

Answer 3

MacPorts is used only for assembly from the source, and this can lead to a magnitudeo difference of several orders of magnitude compared to a package system that retrieves binary files. Consider, as an example, the case of some large package that takes several hours and compares it with the download time in the form of an archive several tens of MB in size.

MacPorts uses Apple’s build tools, and this only adds a little overhead to the build time you get outside MacPorts, the larger the package, the smaller the difference. If you are faced with a huge difference when creating a program outside of MP, you should record a ticket in problem tracking with detailed information.

However, I see that the question is quite old, since 2.0 supports -cf binary archives. Changelog - there is a repository supported by macosforge with collectors who create signed archives, and by default - extract these binary archives, and not create from the source (this you can use the -s flag forcibly). The current user interface is more like binary managers like apt-get, with the ability to easily change configuration and build options.

Answer 4

I do not mind waiting until the Mac-ports will build from source on the latest packages. But why not use all this computing power and offer users the ability to automatically download the assembly to MacPorts, or better yet, hash and offer peer-to-peer connections to other MacPorts users who can choose the turbo option.