Building imaptest and a port

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 29, 2009, at 13:34, Scott Haneda wrote:

> Hello, I want to make a portfile for IMAP test.
> http://www.imapwiki.org/ImapTest/Installation
>
> I built it by hand, but ran into some problems, hopefully I can get  
> some pointers here.
>
> In my .bashrc I have
> export CLICOLOR=1
>
> When I try to build this I get
> $./configure
> checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
> checking whether build environment is sane... configure: error: ls - 
> t appears to fail.  Make sure there is not a broken
> alias in your environment
> configure: error: newly created file is older than distributed files!
> Check your system clock
>
> If I remove the CLICOLOR variable, it will build fine.  Since I  
> have had MacPorts build so many things, and never had this issue, I  
> was hoping someone here can explain to me how to make sure MacPorts  
> does not get hung on this issue.
>
> The man page for `ls`, as far as I can see, is not explaining how  
> the CLICOLOR could affect the output of `ls`. ( Aside from coloring  
> it of course )

Since MacPorts clears the environment, this should not be a problem  
when building within MacPorts.


> Second, as per the install notes, imaptest also needs library  
> functions for dovecot, but does not need make install, libs just  
> need to be there.  There is already a Dovecot port, but that will  
> install the entire package.  In this case, do I make a new Dovecot  
> port that skips the make install part, or do I wrap this all into one?

If you don't "make install" then nothing would be installed, right?  
So that wouldn't help anything. You'd have a port that spends a lot  
of time building things in the work directory, then doesn't install  
them, then cleans up the work directory.


> Third, when a distro points to name-latest.tar.gz, am I to pick a  
> version or just always stick with the latest, which is a moving  
> target? I can not even guarantee that in that download path the  
> older versions stick around much, it looks like they roll them out  
> every now and then.

You should not use a distfile name like name-latest.tar.gz precisely  
because it might be something different later and someone would then  
get a checksum error. So, if offered, you should use a distfile name  
that contains the version number.

In the case of dovecot-latest.tar.gz, it looks like that's not the  
latest stable, but the latest nightly snapshot. Ports should be for  
the latest stable version. If you need to make a port for a  
development version, usually that's done by naming the port with the  
"-devel" suffix (e.g. graphviz-devel, pango-devel, cairo-devel, glib2- 
devel, etc.) I see the problem in this case is that dovecot 1.1.15 is  
the latest stable released version but imaptest needs dovecot 1.2  
which is currently in release candidate 4 status. Maybe 1.2 final  
will be released soon and the dovecot port can be updated to that  
version and there is no problem. If you need dovecot 1.2 immediately,  
then you could make a dovecot-devel port for version 1.2rc4  
downloaded from

http://dovecot.org/releases/1.2/rc/

You should coordinate any such effort with the maintainer of dovecot.