Breaking long dependency chains

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 18, 2012, at 20:21, Jeremy Lavergne wrote:

>> I take it subversion is picked up via "fetch.type svn".
>> 
>> Anyone have the history of why portfetch.tcl depends on port:subversion rather then "bin:svn:subversion"?
> 
> Well we're currently in a situation where the system subversion and the current subversion are not compatible with each other. Ryan was hinting at this when he said he didn't want to upgrade it.

Actually, my reason for not upgrading Subversion is that doing so requires upgrading your working copies, and on the Subversion mailing list, a lot of users were encountering problems where their existing working copies became irrevocably corrupted by the upgrade and the only solution was to check out a new working copy. My working copy of dports has years worth of uncommitted changes in it and rather than spend hours trying to unravel that I'll just not upgrade Subversion at the moment. They may have fixed all these problems in the current version of subversion; I haven't seen any messages about it on their list in awhile. But I still don't feel like risking it for now.

MacPorts only depends on MacPorts subversion for fetch.type svn if the OS version of Subversion is too old -- that is, on Leopard -- or missing -- that is, on Tiger.

https://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/base/src/port1.0/portfetch.tcl?rev=90787#L178

The only reason Leopard's svn is too old is that it does not support the --trust-server-cert option. Here is the ticket requesting we no longer unconditionally use that option, thereby allowing Leopard users to use the bundled svn instead of having to install MacPorts' -- at least for ports not fetching via https or for ports fetching from https with valid certificates.

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/29129