Parsing of ports.conf

[Kevin Van Vechten]

The current implementation was purely "code to the goal" and  
improvements in this area would be welcome.

- kvv

On Mar 26, 2007, at 2:10 PM, Chris Pickel wrote:

> 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