[MacPorts] #46229: Uninstalling all active ports - are you sure?

[MacPorts]

#46229: Uninstalling all active ports - are you sure?
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  Reporter:  stuchalk     |      Owner:  umeshksingla
      Type:  enhancement  |     Status:  assigned
  Priority:  Normal       |  Milestone:
 Component:  base         |    Version:  2.3.3
Resolution:               |   Keywords:
      Port:               |
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Changes (by ryandesign):

 * cc: bitaxis (added)


Comment:

 Do you have a suggestion of how to do it? I imagine there are very few
 people who know MacPorts base well enough to be able to do it. And there
 are several questions about exactly how this feature should behave.

 One problem is that "active" is one of several "pseudo-ports" which expand
 to a list of ports. I imagine MacPorts base has a procedure that performs
 this expansion. And then there are other procedures that perform the
 individual commands like install or uninstall. But the commands like
 install and uninstall never see that you had typed "active"; they just see
 the expanded list of ports. It's analogous to wishing there were a warning
 when you type `rm *` in the shell. `rm` can't give you that warning
 because `rm` never sees that you typed `*`; it only sees the list of items
 that the shell expanded `*` to. The shell could give you a warning anytime
 you typed `*` for any command but that would get tedious in interactive
 use and would break shell scripts.

 Ports and pseudo-ports and other selectors can be combined at will. You
 can ask MacPorts to do something with ports that are `active and not
 outdated` or `inactive and name:^lib` or `outdated and
 maintainer:ryandesign`. Do you want this warning only when the `active`
 pseudo-port is used by itself or anytime it is used as part of a selection
 criteria? Is `active` the only pseudo-port for which you want this
 treatment? Does it only apply to the uninstall command or also to others?

 One option to implement it could be that we need to keep track of which
 pseudo-ports were used and make that available to the commands so they can
 show the warning based on that. Another possibility would be to make the
 warning appear not based on pseudo-ports but instead based on how many
 ports the command would act—so it could warn if you're trying to uninstall
 100 ports, say, regardless whether those 100 ports were specified
 individually or via some pseudo-port expansion.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/46229#comment:4>
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