Questions about hardcoded rsync_path and svn_path

[Chris Pickel]

On 12 Jul, 2007, at 14:56, Simon Ruderich wrote:
> today I had a problem that "port sync" wasn't working anymore. The
> problem was that it used a rsync version which was removed by me.
>
> I didn't knew that macports was using hardcoded paths and so had to
> search for the offending configuration data.
>
> After some time I thought I found it in this file:
> ${prefix}/share/macports/Tcl/port1.0/port_autoconf.tcl
>
> I changed the values but it wasn't working. So I looked further and
> found it here:
> /Library/Tcl/macports1.0/macports_autoconf.tcl
>
> So I have two questions about it:
> 1. Why is macports using hardcoded paths for this sort of values. I
> tried just using "rsync" and it works.

It's not actually using a hard-coded path. Rather, the path is set  
when you ./configure (or when `port selfupdate` ./configures behind  
the scenes) according to the RSYNC environment variable (if it exists).

This is done because, were you to use the rsync port to install a  
faulty binary into /opt/local/bin, you would otherwise lose the  
ability to sync with MacPorts and get a working binary back.  
Instead, ./configure finds a working rsync and makes sure it's always  
used for that installation of MacPorts.

If you grab the tarball from the downloads directory, and ./configure  
with $RSYNC set to the new path, then it should generate those files  
correctly. I'm not sure how selfupdate plays into this, though, since  
`port` messes with environment variables a bit.

> 2. Why are there two (configuration) files similar data.

These are generated from the same configure variables, so it's just a  
matter of convenience. They aren't meant to be edited after ./configure.

> I had some problems with macports hardcoded paths some time ago when I
> tried to install multiple port installations. I never really fixed  
> this
> and have to rename my port installations to get it work.


Chris
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