Listing the ports that will be upgraded in advance

[Michael Dickens]

I would love to see this feature added to the "upgrade" process; or,
really, any time a port is installed (in general). Right now, port will
print a list of ports to be installed that are not already installed. It
would be nice for port to print those dependencies needing to be
upgraded (for any reason) as well, giving the user a choice to do the
upgrade or not (for all, not individually; same as for installing
required dependencies).

To get such a list beforehand (of -all- ports needing to be upgraded,
not just those specifically for the port you're interested in upgrading
or installing), you can always use "port outdated". But, the output is
not very user-friendly and sometimes the list is so long that it's not
useful -- e.g., one cannot easily cherry-pick specific ports to be
upgraded in any order because the list goes on and on for pages. - MLD

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015, at 05:58 AM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> When I install a new port, MacPorts lists all the new dependencies
> that will be installed. But it never lists any of the dependencies
> that need to be upgraded before installing that port***.
> 
> That sometimes really annoys me. Is this additional piece of
> information easy to print in advance or does it require dirty
> hacks/lots of code?
>
> *** Yes, I know that in theory I would have to run "port upgrade
> outdated" first, but in cases when:
> - that would take days or hours to finish (yes, recompiling clang on
> an old ppc notebook really takes something in the order of magnitude
> of a day)
> - the binary package is available, but I'm stuck with "old" variants
> that I want to get rid of first to avoid compiling from source
> I really prefer to pick the order of updates manually.