Version confusion

Bas den Hond lists at butdifferent.com
Sun Apr 1 05:13:29 PDT 2007


Thanks, all clear now.

Not that I agree completely. The average user doesn't need svn if all  
upgrades build and work flawlessly. He or she also could do without,  
if any problems were solved promptly. But precisely because this is  
all done by volunteers and it sometimes takes a while, this average  
person, who isn't up to speed with the structure of portfiles and of  
the /opt tree, and who can't do without the functionality of the  
program in question, will just be saying: I want it back the way it  
was an hour ago, when it all Just Worked. And it can't be done by  
this average user, the original Portfile is gone.

I was bitten by this one when I went from a PPC iBook to an Intel  
MacBook. So just getting out the backup file was not an option. svn  
was my only option. Macports would be much better if I could solve a  
problem like this without having to go outside Macports.

Thanks again!

Bas

>
>> From that same perspective, I would urge the Macports developers  
>> to integrate the svn-trick into the port program itself.  As  
>> things stand now, you think you're ready when you've read the port  
>> manpage, but eventually you discover you have to install and then  
>> learn svn, too, in order to manage any syncing problems.
>
> You do not need to use or learn how to use Subversion in order to  
> use MacPorts (not that it's difficult). The reason I am using a  
> Subversion working copy for my ports tree is that I am a committer  
> and need to have such a working copy in order to submit changes.
>
> If there is a problem in a portfile, we need to fix the problem in  
> the portfile, not go back to an earlier version of the portfile. Of  
> course, we're all volunteers here with other things to do besides  
> maintain MacPorts, so sometimes it takes awhile to fix problems. If  
> you know the solution, you can also just locally edit your portfile  
> (with e.g. "port edit foo" or "cd `port dir foo` && open Portfile")  
> to fix whatever the problem is. And you can create a ticket in the  
> Trac system describing the problem and attach a patch so that  
> someone with commit access can fix it for good. Creating such a  
> patch is easier when you're using a Subversion working copy ("svn  
> di > foo.diff"), but if you remember to make a copy of the portfile  
> before your changes ("sudo cp Portfile Portfile.orig") then it's  
> still easy enough to get the diff ("diff -u Portfile.orig Portfile  
> > foo.diff").




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