I think that, by and large, MacPorts wants to ultimately build things. I was just looking at the MacVim port and it does not have a way of downloading the Release from GitHub (as far as I can tell). It will download a precompiled binary from the MacPorts build farm, but it has Sparkle disabled, etc., so it is managed fully from MacPorts.

It would be an interesting discussion to have, as they do have some of that sort of thing (the 1Password CLI, for example), but I don’t know what the general policy would be.

I’d love to see MacPorts get more funding for build resources and to potentially add that, because the way that Homebrew works occasionally leaves things broken (`pipx` venvs are a great example).