Checking for outdated ports (was: Re: imagemagick/montage problem)

Ryan Schmidt macports-2006d at ryandesign.com
Wed Oct 25 15:08:01 PDT 2006


On Oct 25, 2006, at 03:49, Joerg van den Hoff wrote:

>> 6.2.9-8 is current for ImageMagick.  Sounds like you haven't done  
>> a 'port
>> selfupdate' in awhile.  See if the new version fixes it.
>
> thanks a lot. fact is, port `montage -version' yielded 6.2.7 _and_  
> `port outdated' did _not_ list imagemagick so I thought everything  
> was fine (`port selfupdate' told me that everything was up to  
> date). but nevertheless `port info imagemagick' reported 6.2.9.8 as  
> current version, no idea why `port' did not list imagemagick as  
> outdated.

Well, understand what each command does:

"port outdated" checks if any installed ports are outdated, compared  
with the portindex that's currently on your machine. When you ran  
"port outdated", your portindex was apparently still rather old, so  
it told you nothing was outdated.

"port sync" downloads the current portindex.

"port selfupdate" is a combination of two things: "port sync" and  
also upgrading the base MacPorts software, if necessary. The message  
you got told you that the base MacPorts software did not need  
updating. This has nothing to do with your installed ports, however.

After running "port selfupdate", you now have the current portindex.  
If at this point you had again run "port outdated" you would have  
seen that ImageMagick was outdated.

So the correct way to periodically see if you need to update anything  
is to run "sudo port sync" followed by "port outdated". And if you  
see an announcement on the list that a new version of MacPorts is  
available, then you should run "sudo port selfupdate". Or you could  
schedule a selfupdate to occur regularly, for example every month,  
using cron.




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