macports_version

[Clemens Lang]

Hi,

----- On 22 May, 2018, at 13:12, Ryan Schmidt ryandesign at macports.org wrote:

> I'm confused by the inconsistency between variables like macosx_version and
> xcodeversion, and the macports_version proc.

xcodeversion and macosx_version are handled very different in the code.
xcodeversion, xcodebuildcmd and developer_dir are deferred options, i.e. they
are only copied into the port interpreter when they are read. macosx_version
is copied immediately. You can compare them from a user's PoV, but they are
very different from the system view.

One big downside of using variables (apart from the non-obvious property of
being constant) is documentation. There is no good place in the code to
document these variables – consequently we do not have any documentation for
macosx_version, but macports::version is documented [1]. I believe all public
API available in macports1.0 should be documented.


[1] https://github.com/macports/macports-base/blob/master/src/macports1.0/macports.tcl#L87-L98

-- 
Clemens Lang