Portfile Workflow Advice

[Sean Farley]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 2:18 AM, rod <rod at pu-gh.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I've been finding developing and especially updating Portfiles a bit tricky
> and error prone, so have been writing some tools for myself to help with
> this...
>
> https://github.com/rodnaph/pearl
> https://github.com/rodnaph/ghsum

Neato.

> But while submitting the second via Trac it was pointed out you can do this
> already with Macports...
>
> $> port -d checksum
>
> So I was wondering what tools everyone else uses to create and update their
> Portfiles?  Are all the utilities provided through the "port" tool and I'm
> just missing them?  Or are there other utilities (like
> https://trac.macports.org/browser/users/ryandesign/scripts/portcheckup) that
> are available to help?
>
> Any links/tips appreciated, and I'd be especially interested if someone
> could describe their workflow too.

I'm pretty new here, so take my advice with a grain of salt :-) My
workflow consists of using mercurial instead of subversion but that is
personal preference. I see you're on github, so you might have seen
the macports git repo already but just in case you haven't,

git://git.macports.org/macports/trunk.git

and for those that prefer mercurial,

https://bitbucket.org/seanfarley/macports

As for common tasks such as changing the checksum, I have gotten by so
far with using `port -v <command>` to fail at the extraction phase and
tell me the checksum. Also, I use codesearch (already in macports)
through emacs with this script,

https://github.com/abingham/codesearch.el

so that I can easily search for how other ports do common tasks. With
all of that being said, I still have questions of my own:

1) The gap between Trac and the mailing lists is huge. Sometimes there
are long discussion on Trac that I completely miss since they don't
happen on the mailing list. My question is how could we close this
gap?

2) Patch review? Sometimes I have questions on how to do a particular
task (i.e. best practice for "extracting" a script that isn't zipped?)
but can't figure it out by looking at other portfiles mostly due to
the fact that it's not commonly done. I could send an email to the dev
mailing list asking the quesetion, just commit the portfile and hope
that someone points out a better way, send a patch to the mailing
list, or submit a Trac ticket. Over the last year of so of lurking, I
haven't quite seen a uniform practice set, so any feedback is much
appreciated.