GSoC port-util project

[Bradley Giesbrecht]

> On Feb 15, 2016, at 6:59 PM, Michael Dickens <michaelld at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Feb 15, 2016, at 09:33 PM, Mihai Moldovan wrote:
>> On 16.02.2016 01:34 AM, Michael Dickens wrote:
>>> An example would be a "check and try update" task that would: do a
>>> livecheck and if found to be old then automatically try to do the
>>> update: change the version, download the distfile, update the checksums
>>> in the Portfile, try to upgrade using -s -k to specify from source and
>>> to keep stuff around if successful.
>> 
>> Just a thought on this particular item... maybe it's just me OCDing, but
>> I don't
>> think a procedure like this should be sanctioned. Blindly updating like
>> this is
>> dangerous, because you run into problems with also updated dependencies,
>> which
>> you might not even see.
>> 
>> I generally diff the old and new version (if possible using SCM as that's
>> more
>> comfortable) and look through what might have changed within the
>> autotools files
>> (or whatever build system the port is using.)
>> 
>> It's a tedious task, but you risk missing changes otherwise.
> 
> I somehow doubt that most of us Portfile-level developers do a lot of
> SCM diffing between versions. I know for myself that there's just not
> enough time in the day to do so for every port I maintain. For some
> ports I do do this, just just a few. That said, if any specific MP dev
> want to do SCM diffing then that's his/her right IMHO. I don't think
> this MO should be required of all MP devs on all ports.
> 
> I see this particular item as a quick way to test to see if a port needs
> updating, and if so then test to see if it is easily updatable. It has
> everything to do with buildability, and nothing to do with diffing
> between versions.
> 
> All of this said, I think we're talking hypotheticals here anyway. I'm
> not even sure this is what pixilla meant in the first place. - MLD

This is along the lines of what I had in mind.

I have a bunch of scripts for creating patches, checking for updates, checking trac for tickets, svn {st,diff,ci} etc…, and I know others do to. I don’t know if TCL has this capability but I would be handy at times to dump all declared vars instead of hunting through port groups, man pages and other portfiles. And env vars.

Ideally a port-util that could act like port (load the same libs) but be extended via plugins to included things best left out of the port command.

—
Brad