going to unstable

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 26, 2007, at 17:42, Malcolm Fitzgerald wrote:

> On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 06:14:15 -0500 Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> On Jun 21, 2007, at 23:27, Malcolm Fitzgerald wrote:
>>
>>> I'd like to try the latest bluefish releases. How do I do that with
>>> MacPorts?
>>
>> There is no "unstable" tree in MacPorts as there is in some other
>> package managers. MacPorts only has a single tree.
>>
>> Development/unstable versions of some ports are available though the
>> use of separate ports whose names end with -devel. However, no port
>> "bluefish-unstable" appears to exist at present. You could create  
>> one...
>
> What are the requirements. I don't have any C skills. Is there are  
> web site that documents the process?

Portfiles are written in Tcl, though I didn't know Tcl very well when  
I started and it's very easy to learn. It's a lot more like writing a  
configuration file or a shell script than writing C code.

The documentation is out of date and currently only available in the  
Internet archive:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060427120406/darwinports.opendarwin.org/ 
docs/

Some other scattered notes are available in the wiki:

http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/wiki

See also the various manpages (type "man portfile" in the Terminal,  
for example).

The best thing to do is look at existing portfiles and see how they  
do things (type "port edit mysql5-devel" for example). Especially  
compare the -devel and non-devel versions of ports where both exist  
(like mysql5 and mysql5-devel, mutt and mutt-devel, rsync and rsync- 
devel, etc.). Type "port search devel" to see 'em all.

And again, I made a typo in my message from the 22nd: I wrote  
"bluefish-unstable" but I meant to write "bluefish-devel".