ports.macports.org gives strange port dependencies

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Mon, 26 Sept 2022 at 20:54, Chris Jones wrote:
>
> FWIW I personally would also favour more correct over a bit faster any day of the week…
> so if switching back to rsync would allow the stats to reflect say the most recent OS precisely,
> for me thats a price worth paying.

To me by far the best option would be to fix portindex to work
correctly when the -p flag is passed. I assume that we could easily
hardcode the default compiler on each darwin OS and start from there.

The current situation means that we are basically shipping a somewhat
wrong portindex to "every single user" out there, even if that
portindex was generated on Darwin.

Note that we do all kinds of stuff on the server (run portindex,
process portindex, run livecheck, play a bit with git commits, ...)
and if one can rely on running portindex locally, it's easy to process
one commit at a time and remember when a port got added, deleted,
modified etc. One is deprived from all those nice options if one needs
to depend on an external portindex generated at some random point in
the past.

Switching back to the pregenerated portindex might break the processes
in some hard-to-spot ways. I'm not saying that we should stick with
the current implementation for every cost, but I would prefer to think
twice if we couldn't perhaps solve the problem at the source and make
ourselves life easier rather than using some patchy workarounds.

Regarding ports belonging to each OS version. I totally agree that
having the port page display different information based on the OS
version would be pretty cool functionality. The decision to start with
a single version of PortIndex was somewhat deliberate though. We had
to choose between a simpler approach (MVP: minimum viable product) and
bigger chances to end up with a nicely functional website vs. to tons
of added complexity bundled with an increased risk of ending up with a
semi-non-functional site at the end of the summer. If someone is
willing to step up and add better support for different OS versions
now, that would certainly be more than welcome.

Mojca