Deprecating port list

[Andre Stechert]

I use port list but only in the following ways:

port list | wc -l
    answers the question "how many ports does macports have nowadays?
we catching up to freebsd yet?"

port list | grep ...
    answers the question "is /re/ a port?" without requiring me to
understand port search's syntax and/or limitations compared to regular
old grep.

port list | awk ...
    allows me to perform arbitrary shell operations against the entire
set of possible ports for cleanup, statistics, or whatever.

The second usage should probably be replaced with port search
(provided that the operators are of equivalent expressive power), but
I'm not sure how I'd do the others without port list.  What would you
suggest?

Thanks,
Andre

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Jay Levitt
<lists-macports at shopwatch.org> wrote:
> Rainer Müller wrote:
>> This is basically 'port outdated'. What would be the use of this if it
>> is so similar?
>
> I think "port list" could/should be an alias for "port outdated".  I'm not
> usually a fan of synonyms, but "list" is a basic function, provided by yum,
> gem, and quite probably others.  Sure, you can document it in the wiki, but
> why force users to look something up and type a different command when you
> already know what they mean?
>
> Is there a use case where someone would be displeased by the output of "port
> outdated" when they do a "port list", and where they'd be more pleased to
> see "Please see the documentation" or "No such command?"
>
> Jay Levitt
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