Automatic out-of-dateness checking for base and ports tree

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 7, 2007, at 21:01, Chris Pickel wrote:

> On 07 Jun, 2007, at 18:10, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> MacPorts does neither: it doesn't auto-update the base software,  
>> but if you update the ports tree (or do a fresh install of  
>> MacPorts, which pulls down a current ports tree), it may not work  
>> with your old version of MacPorts. And this is a problem I think  
>> we should solve.
>
> You've identified a key point here: the problem occurs when the  
> ports tree is synced without a selfupdate. It seems that this could  
> be solved by keeping a file containing the target version in the  
> ports tree. That file would be compared against ${prefix}/etc/ 
> macports/mp_version to see if the installed version is new enough.
>
> This would require no periodic checking, other than the `port sync`  
> which has to happen anyway. Nor would there be any possibility of  
> the user having problems in the intermittent period between the  
> server update and their check.

Why do we even have two commands -- sync and selfupdate? Why can't we  
just have a single command which always does the right thing?