port doesn't exit with proper return value

[Joshua Root]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
> On May 17, 2008, at 1:50 AM, Joshua Root wrote:
> 
>> Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>>> On May 16, 2008, at 7:46 AM, Joshua Root wrote:
>>>> Port's normal mode of operation is to run as many of the requested
>>>> commands as possible and not exit when a command fails. It does this by
>>>> suppressing the error status from the commands. This is certainly
>>>> incorrect when there's only one command run and it fails, but it's less
>>>> clear what should happen when some of the requested commands succeed.
>>>>
>>>> You can make the first failed command cause port to exit, with the
>>>> appropriate return code, by using the -x option on the command line.
>>>>
>>>> Related tickets:
>>>>
>>>> http://trac.macports.org/ticket/13918
>>>> http://trac.macports.org/ticket/14928
>>> Seems like -x should be the default, or rather, that the -x option 
>>> should be removed, and port should always issue an error message and 
>>> stop with a nonzero exit status the moment something goes wrong. Why 
>>> would one not want that?
>>
>> I think the idea is that if you run `port install foo bar baz` or 
>> `port upgrade outdated`, and one of the ports fails to 
>> install/upgrade, you probably want it to still do the others. This is 
>> certainly the case when the operation will take a long time and you 
>> want to be able to leave it unattended.
> 
> On the contrary, I do want MacPorts to stop as soon as it runs into an 
> error. If I say "port upgrade cairo pango graphviz", and graphviz 
> depends on pango, and pango depends on cairo, and maybe the latest 
> version of graphviz requires the latest version of pango which requires 
> the latest version of cairo, and suppose that cairo fails to upgrade, 
> then I do not want MacPorts to attempt to upgrade pango or graphviz.

So the underlying issue is that MP doesn't support version ranges for 
dependencies, which allows a failed upgrade to detrimentally affect 
others without making them fail.

If in the example you instead run `port upgrade graphviz`, it will also 
try to upgrade pango and cairo if they are outdated, right? If pango is 
outdated and fails to upgrade, does the graphviz upgrade also fail as a 
result?

- Josh