How to pin a package?

[Jeffrey Walton]

On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 11:24 AM Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
>
> On Mar 14, 2020, at 00:39, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
>
> > My old PowerMac G5 cannot build the CMake being supplied with
> > MacPorts. I know CMake now requires C+11 or C++14, and the antique
> > tools on the Mac do not meet the requirements. I want to pin CMake to
> > an older version for the Mac. For example, 3.15.4 or 3.14.6.
> >
> > How do I pin a package using MacPorts?
>
> MacPorts doesn't have a "pin a package" feature. We would not be able to accommodate the explosion of bug reports that would arise if we allowed users to construct arbitrary combinations of versions of ports from the past. Instead, we focus on providing a single collection of ports that are hopefully somewhat up to date and should work together.
>
> In a collection of this size, it is inevitable that at any given point some things will be broken, such as the bug you found where cmake doesn't build on 10.5 right now. Those bugs should be fixed.
>
> While we don't allow users to decide what version of a port they want, the maintainer of a port can make such decisions and it can be based on variables. For example, several ports already restrict themselves to an older version of the software when the port is installed on older operating systems if the latest version of the software no longer builds on older systems. If that were necessary to resolve this issue for 10.5, the maintainer of the port could choose to do that, however it's not clear at this point whether that would help.

Ack, thanks.

Based on Ken's advice I'll build it with GCC 5.

Jeff