MacPorts 1.5.2 now available

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2007-08-31 18:05:21 -0500, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On Aug 31, 2007, at 03:36, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
>> Then that's a user-side problem. The best fix is to remove/replace this
>> incredibly old version of readline.
>
> Of course. But if MacPorts *seems* to build correctly against this old 
> readline, and several ports *seem* to build correctly against the old 
> readline, and the user doesn't even know the old readline is there because 
> some other 3rd-party software they wanted installed it there for them, and 
> then one day they want to build db44 and it throws bizarre errors that 
> nobody figures out how to fix for months [1],

That's different: users can get the benefit of new library versions
as ports, and $prefix has the precedence over /usr/local, so that
there's no problem in not using /usr/local (and there is no need for
specific hack).

> then this gives the impression that MacPorts is unreliable. So it
> *becomes* our problem to ensure the user doesn't make these kinds of
> mistakes.

Yes, but there is no need to try to fix things for the user. Just
detect the problem in configure and ask the user to remove the
library.

> Well I have no idea about that but if it's important, then MacPorts
> should include an updated readline and use that exclusively.

This is generally what software does when it requires some specific
version of a library that could lead to compatibility problems if
installed in some directory like /usr/local.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)