I just read the post of Bart Decrem about his actions to clean up his system. I was delighted to read that he found an application to look graphically to the used discspace called Disk Inventory. Currently I was using WhatSize to do this, but not graphically ;-)
This cleaning-thing reminds me that some days ago I installed Monolingual, a small application to remove all unwanted languages and binaries from the .app files/folders. This freed around 2 GB on my drive. Hope that others will use it to. (note: next time your apps will run they will ask a change to the keyring. As the content of the folder changed, the checksums also changed and the mac-keyring thingie needs ask your permission it is ok)

Finally the patch has been submitted as bug/enhancement #10919. As said on my previous post there was a little issue with importing the variable saved in the ports.conf file. Thanks to Philip the problem is solved. For techies: I defined my variable as

portarchivebinhost   "http://mac.vandeplas.com/packages"

instead of

portarchivebinhost   http://mac.vandeplas.com/packages

(without the "). It was as simple as that...

The next step is to work on a chroot where I can safely compile the ports without filling my system with unwanted things (that's what I was doing now, and it looks like that MacPorts doesn't keep a list of the installed files like gentoo/portage does).

On the other hand I will need to work on my script to automagically compile all ports with different variants. That is a little more complicated as it looks, because some variants should not be used together. I'd be also nice to keep a list of the ports that do not compile cleanly.

That's all for my 3rd bugreport for MacPorts.

This weekend I finally found some time to hack on MacPorts. The thing I needed/wanted was support for binary downloads. The standard way MacPorts works is by compiling every package, once this package is compiled it can be archived on the hard drive to be used later. Binary downloads are not yet possible with the current version.

With my lack of Tcl knownledge it wasn't easy to hack that code to add this new feature. But after some hours trying to understand the way Tcl works and the basic structure of the code I needed to modify I finally got what I wanted: automagical download of the binary file from a server. With my hack MacPorts will first look for the binary on the local disc, then download the file, and if that file isn't available on the chosen binhost, compile the thing.

Unfortunately I couln't yet understand how to import variables from the ports.conf file. And thus the binhost is hardcoded in the current patch. Once I find a way to fix this, I will send the patches to the MacPorts devteam and hope they will add it in the official code. During this time I will continue to compile as much ports as possible to offer an binhost for MacTel (intel mac) users. (currently the size of my binhost is 700 MB).

That was my work for saturday... on sunday we had a ubuntu-be activity. With some fellow ubuntu-promotors we went to a computerfair. But for more information about that I just send you to the site of Lisje.

Comme mon portable Acer est cassé, et que la garantie n'est plus valable j'ai du prendre la décision difficile d'acheter un autre ordinateur. Plus jamais de Acer ! J'hésitais donc entre Lenovo et Apple. Et c'est devenu Apple. Mon MaBook devrait arriver le 30 juin, juste après mes examens... Coté upgrade de hardware j'ai choisis la version avec graveur DVD et 1 GB de ram...Bientôt des nouvelles de cette petite merveille...