[22007] portutil.tcl mods / more portfile.7 changes needed?

[Mark Duling]

macports-dev at lists.macosforge.org on Tuesday, February 13, 2007 at 7:09 PM
-0800 wrote:
>Reimplement delete so it no longer uses system "/bin/rm -rf ..."
>This also fixes the case of filenames with spaces in them being
>incorrectly parsed - That was EXTREMELY dangerous
>Add new touch command - usage similar to BSD touch
>Add new copy and move commands - basically aliases for file copy/rename
>Add new ln command - usage similar to BSD ln
>These should be documented somewhere

I might be able to find time to document this.  Especially because as I
think about it there are still a couple of glaring omissions from our
docs.  I've written many portfiles and I still don't know the answer.  Is
there a way to do recursive copies without using a system call?  I know
how to use glob and recurse files within a directory, but I'm still not
clear on whether it can be done for arbitrary contents of a directory.  It
seems not.

So perhaps more portfile.7 manpage work is needed to answer these
questions.  They all revolve around globbing or recursion.

1) The use of 'glob'.  It is missing from the manpages, is it not?  Also
provide liberal examples in the reinplace section and xinstall section.

2)  Is it possible for reinplace to replace multiple strings for the same
file with one statement?

3) The answer to whether generic recursive queries can be accomplished
with TCL extensions.

   3a) If the answer is no but a generic TCL script can be wrapped around
xinstall using globs, then an example be given for doing this.  If neither
3 or 3a is possible, state that system calls for recursive copies are
acceptible.

If someone can answer these questions adequately I may be able to find
time to document this in portfile.7.  It should be pretty simple and I
think it would clear up some confusion.

Mark