Issues with oudated ports / GitHub

[Ryan Schmidt]

> On Oct 7, 2016, at 10:59 AM, Marcel Bischoff <marcel at herrbischoff.com> wrote:
> 
>>> It pains me to say that Homebrew is running circles around MacPorts in
>>> the department of current available packages.
>> 
>> [citation needed] ;-)
> 
> Gladly. I have written a small script to check that. Here are a few of
> the results (of some tools I work with/run on a daily basis):
> 
> ghc
> MacPorts version: 7.8.3_4
> Homebrew version: 8.0.1
> 
> fontforge
> MacPorts version: 20120731_3
> Homebrew version: 20161001
> 
> pandoc
> MacPorts version: 1.12.4.2_1
> Homebrew version: 1.17.2
> 
> boost
> MacPorts version: 1.59.0_2
> Homebrew version: 1.62.0
> 
> fdupes
> MacPorts version: 1.51
> Homebrew version: 1.6.1
> 
> imapsync
> MacPorts version: 1.684
> Homebrew version: 1.727
> 
> mutt
> MacPorts version: 1.6.0_1
> Homebrew version: 1.7.0
> 
> notmuch
> MacPorts version: 0.22.2
> Homebrew version: 0.23
> 
> sqlmap
> MacPorts version: 0.9_1
> Homebrew version: 1.0.10
> 
> While the latter examples are just minor differences, especially things
> like ghc, fontforge an pandoc are either completely broken and/or
> severely outdated. I'm not trying to badmouth anyone or anything, just
> pointing to the higher (successful) update rate in Homebrew.
> 
>>> If time and manpower is the problem, wouldn't it be better to move to a
>>> GitHub-based approach like Homebrew does?
>> 
>> That doesn't necessarily fix the problem. It's worth noting that there already is a plan to transition to github.
> 
> Why is that? Also: what do you think the problem actually is and how to
> rectify it? I'd be very interested to hear that.

The problem is: somebody needs to do the correct work to update each of those ports to the latest version. In many cases, tickets are already filed, and you can look them up to see what the current status is; if you don't find a ticket, please file a new one. In some cases, such as boost, pandoc, ghc, there are serious issues preventing the update. If Homebrew has solved those problems, great, maybe we can crib from them.