Mid-Term Report

[Joshua Root]

On 2014-6-28 02:48 , Rainer Müller wrote:
> On 2014-06-27 07:47, Joshua Root wrote:
>> On 2014-6-27 05:29 , Shashwat Pandey wrote:
>>> I am a Google Summer of Code 2014 student working on the 'Interactive
>>> Port Command' project for Macports. I have been working for about a
>>> month now and would like to show the progress i have made.
>>
>> Sounds like good work for the most part. One note:
>>
>>> # Added global flag '-N' for non-interactive invocations. Interactivity
>>> is the default behaviour.
>>
>> This will break people's scripts. If users don't do anything different,
>> the behaviour should stay the same. I would provide a different
>> executable name for interactive use, but I guess a command line and/or
>> config option to make port(1) behave that way would be OK too.
> 
> We have broken the backwards compatibility of the port command multiple
> times already by changing strings and its output formats. We don't make
> any guarantees for that, do we?

No, but changing a command that never asked for user input to now do so
is a much bigger change. You can't even just run something and check the
exit code then.

> If you redirect the command output or it is not connected to a terminal,
> port(1) will automatically behave non-interactively as it did before.

OK, that's not as bad. But does that prevent the use of tools like expect?

> Maybe we should also have an option in macports.conf to force
> non-interactive mode?

A different executable name for interactive operation is simpler.

- Josh