[MacPorts] #17992: non-installed ports cause warning about non-matching variants on upgrade

[MacPorts]

#17992: non-installed ports cause warning about non-matching variants on upgrade
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 Reporter:  jmr@…             |       Owner:  gwhitney@…           
     Type:  defect            |      Status:  assigned             
 Priority:  Normal            |   Milestone:  MacPorts Future      
Component:  base              |     Version:  1.8.0                
 Keywords:                    |        Port:                       
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Changes (by gwhitney@…):

  * owner:  macports-tickets@… => gwhitney@…
  * status:  new => assigned


Comment:

 Obviously as the author of r44362 I'd like to look into this.  But the
 above is not quite enough information for me to understand what's going
 on.  What is the exact port upgrade command that produced this warning?
 What ports need to be installed (or not installed) for the erroneous
 warning to occur?  The code that produces this warning thinks that XFree86
 is installed; however, there is a hack (earlier in the code path, a hack I
 did not put in) which sets a port "installed outside MacPorts" (whatever
 that means) to appear to be installed. So I suspect we're hitting an
 interaction between that hack and the code I put in.  (I have to say that
 I do not understand why the hack is necessary.)   Could I have the output
 of the port upgrade lowest down the dependency chain which exhibits this
 behavior, but with -d specified? And the output of "port installed"?  To
 reproduce, it would be nice to know what's the minimum set of packages I
 have to install to create this spurious warning on an upgrade, but you
 might not know that.  If you do, so I could reproduce the issue here, that
 would be ideal.  If not, I can try to debug it from the "-d" output.

 Finally, as a MacPorts developer, you don't happen to have any idea what
 the purpose is of the hack in which an uninstalled port is marked as
 installed during the operation of "port upgrade", do you?

 Thanks, sorry for the disruption r44362 is causing -- hopefully on balance
 it's still more good than harm.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://trac.macports.org/ticket/17992#comment:1>
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