portlist.tcl: illegal byte sequence

[Joshua Root]

Diffing your portlist.tcl with a fresh copy downloaded from 
<https://github.com/macports/macports-base/blob/v2.11.6/src/portlist1.0/portlist.tcl> 
will show you exactly what has changed at least, which may give some 
further clue.

- Josh

On 26/12/2025 03:22, Jason Liu wrote:
> That's a good point. In fact, the modification timestamp on portlist.tcl 
> is 2025-10-29 05:01, which would seem to indicate that the file hasn't 
> been touched for the past couple of months.
> 
> The "illegal byte sequence" error does point to file corruption, but the 
> mystery is how that might have occurred. I did also check the ZFS volume 
> where the virtual disk for my MacPorts development VM is stored, and 
> none of the the weekly scrubs have repaired any bits, nor has any 
> resilvering been performed, which are typically early indicators that a 
> drive might be failing.
> 
> -- 
> Jason Liu
> 
> 
> On Wed, Dec 24, 2025 at 9:06 PM Ryan Carsten Schmidt 
> <ryandesign at macports.org <mailto:ryandesign at macports.org>> wrote:
> 
>     On Dec 24, 2025, at 18:49, Jason Liu wrote:
>>
>>     
>>
>>         portlist.tcl is a text file, not created by clang, and Jason
>>         didn't mention running selfupdate so there's no reason why
>>         that file should have been changed.
>>
>>
>>     Sorry, I forgot to mention that. This did, in fact, occur after a
>>     selfupdate. I have my MacPorts development VMs run a selfupdate
>>     every night around 5:00am-ish.
> 
>     Ok but unless that selfupdate resulted in MacPorts base being
>     updated, that file wouldn't have been touched.
> 
>     And if you run selfupdate daily then you'd have updated to the
>     latest version 2.11.6 weeks ago when it was released.
>