Parsing of ports.conf

[Chris Pickel]

I've been reading through the source for macports, figuring out how  
it goes about its business, and one particular part struck me as odd-- 
the parsing of conf_files, i.e. ports.conf. The relevant code is at  
darwinports.tcl, lines 223-233

For each line in a conf file, for each bootstrap option, this code  
tests if it is of the format (roughly) of "<that_option>  
<a_setting>", and if so, sets the option. As a result, any line which  
is not of that format will be silently ignored. So, if the user makes  
a typo, or an option is deprecated in a later version of MacPorts,  
there is no message to that effect.

It also seems like the "Tcl way" (insofar as I've learned it in the  
past few days) would be to sandbox a Tcl interpreter for the purpose  
of parsing the file. Then, in addition to getting error messages for  
errors, you could set the prefix and later write "sources_conf $ 
{prefix}/etc/ports/sources.conf", the benefit of which is I think  
fairly obvious.

Mainly, I am wondering if anyone here knows a reason (other than, at  
this point, backwards-compatibility) why it is done the way it is. If  
not, I'm going to have a go tonight at rewriting it in what I hope  
will be a more sensible manner.


Regards,

Chris Pickel
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/attachments/20070326/28f794aa/PGP.bin