PortGroup directory hierarchy/priority

René J. V. Bertin rjvbertin at gmail.com
Thu Mar 31 13:36:26 PDT 2016


Rainer Müller wrote:

> Does your custom ports tree not just provide a custom implementation of
> this port group? Or do the ports using this modified port group not need
> any further modifications, but you do not want to copy all Portfiles to
> your ports tree?

I indeed have custom Qt5 and CMake PortGroups (and a few others), and indeed I 
do not want to copy all ports that depend on either Qt5 or CMake (or both) into 
my own port tree. My own port tree only contains my own ports, and a number of 
ports that have local patches, updates or have been kept at an older version.
Evidently, I do want all ports that build using CMake to use my PortGroup 
version, idem for Qt5 (and Qt4 and KDE4).

So in the end I copy my PortGroup files into the rsync-based default port tree, 
and I don't run selfupdate anymore (I cherry-pick upgrades from the svn port 
tree instead). I have no idea how long I'll be able to keep that up ...

Mojca:
> Most often I was getting errors saying that a required variable (which
> I just added to the PortGroup) was not defined. 
...
> Next time when I hit a problem I'll try to investigate in the spirit
> of tree where the PortGroup lives.

I think you're 

> The lookup strategy is also the same for mirror/archive sites, 

How many ports need to change those?

> variant descriptions, livecheck

Those are mostly defined in ports, I'd say, or in some cases in PortGroups.

> . I am not sure whether it would make sense to
> change this for all of them (for example archive sites are definitely
> only local to a ports tree) or to introduce a special lookup just for
> port groups...

Can you give examples? I'm having trouble imagining why there would be any need 
to change the lookup strategy for those.

R



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