macports with closed stdout

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 5, 2015, at 12:58 PM, Clemens Lang wrote:

>> It doesn't really apply when doing a bunch of updates or installs, but rather
>> working on a single port. In this particular case, I was checking whether the
>> current version of one of my ports would still build from scratch. On my own
>> system I tend to do incremental builds, which sometimes means I end up with
>> patchfiles that no longer apply correctly. If you're repeating the patch
>> phase multiple times until all affected patchfiles have been corrected, having
>> to wait almost a minute each time before the patch phase actually starts is
>> annoying.
> 
> MacPorts isn't built to do incremental builds and this is unsupported. Nobody
> can stop you from using it in this way, but don't be surprised when people do
> not understand what your problem is or why it is a problem. If you don't want
> the dependency calculation to happen, don't use MacPorts but build from source
> on your own.

You can also prevent the dependency calculation by using the "-n" flag.

sudo port -n patch

This should not be something you do routinely when upgrading ports, because rebuilding due to a changed dependency is a very common reason for a port author to mark a port to be updated by increasing its revision; if you circumvent that using the -n flag you will have circumvented the reason for the rebuild.

But if you already know your dependencies are up to date, and you just want to avoid repeated dependency calculations that you already know are unnecessary as you work on authoring another port, -n can be helpful.