[MacPorts] #15868: port-1.600: port sync fails with "please get a newer Subversion client"

[Rainer Müller]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On Feb 17, 2009, at 01:20, Rainer Müller wrote:
>> In my opinion binaries which are vital for the operation of MacPorts
>> should be used from an absolute path. As far as I see, this is only
>> bzip2 in registry1.0 as you cannot activate/deactivate ports anymore
>> when bzip2 is broken. 'port deactivate' can most probably fix  
>> easily all
>> other issues introduced by broken binaries in PATH.
> 
> bzip2 is essential for dealing with receipts, yes, but bzip2, gzip  
> and tar are also essential for decompressing the vast majority of  
> distfiles. We've seen failures at extract time when a user migrated a  
> bzip2 from a previous Mac's MacPorts installation that got broken.

In my opinion decompressing distfiles is not vital. When the registry is
broken, it is hard to get it fixed agin. But if a decompressor (tar,
gzip, bzip2) is broken, it's easy to deactivate this port and use the
one from the system.

Rainer