SSL Issues and PortGroup GitHub

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 16, 2016, at 3:09 PM, John Patrick wrote:

> I'm having issues with mac ports using the github PortGroup.
> 
> I've raised two tickets over the past year and basically got told it
> wasn't an issue with the port itself.
> 
> https://trac.macports.org/ticket/49539
> 
> https://trac.macports.org/ticket/51381
> 
> Basically via "port install X", I get and error "SSL certificate
> problem: Couldn't understand the server certificate format".
> 
> If I manually perform the git clone task which is reported in the log
> file, it works for me.
> 
> Does anyone know of any mac port that uses the github PortGroup and
> works? All ports I've tried fail with the same SSL certificate
> problem.

The above problems all relate to git cloning, and only occur on some users' systems. (Not mine, for example.) Most ports using the github portgroup do not clone using git, but instead fetch a tarball, and so are not affected by this problem.


> How can I help debug this issue and attempt a patch?
> 
> The ansible github project has release here
> https://github.com/ansible/ansible/archive/v2.2.0.0-1.tar.gz as an
> example. But the github.tarball_from option doesn't appear to have any
> options to use that archive

Note that that is not a "release" (in the sense of "github.tarball_from releases") but is instead only a tag (in the sense of "github.tarball_from tags" which is the default). If that will work, absolutely we should be using that instead. But all ports that fetch using git clone, rather than a tarball, do so because using the automatically-generated tarball doesn't work: these projects use a feature called git submodules, and the automatically-generated github tarballs do not contain the contents of the submodules, so those tarballs are incomplete and cannot build the software.

The problem would be solved if the project would produce actual github releases and attach manually-created complete tarballs, but the developers of ansible have not done that. If you would like to begin a dialog with them about doing that, that would be great.

The fact that the github portgroup's github.tarball_from deals with tarball-style URLs but does not offer the option to deal with archive-style URLs is orthogonal -- implementing support for archive URLs will not help your situation -- but that issue is tracked at https://trac.macports.org/ticket/40518