port activate error: can't read "revision": no such variable

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 10, 2007, at 01:28, Paulo Moura wrote:

> On 2007/05/10, at 05:58, Boey Maun Suang wrote:
>
>> You wouldn't happen to be running MacPorts from ToT (a.k.a.  
>> trunk), rather than a release version?
>
> Nope, I'm running the latest stable one (1.440).
>
>> James Berry has committed some changes recently that removes '+'  
>> from the list of acceptable characters in port names (see top of  
>> the current ChangeLog [1]).  If that's not it, I'm out of ideas :-)
>
> That change seems (from an outsider) quite arbitrary. Certainly is  
> possible to escape strings containing characters like "+"?  
> Especially if a name is acceptable as file system name.

Maun Suang, that change should affect port names only, not version  
numbers. I'm not sure if there's any validation on version numbers.

Paulo, the change is not arbitrary. The + sign has special meaning in  
MacPorts: it precedes a selected variant. Perhaps there are parts of  
MacPorts that become confused when the + sign is used in unexpected  
places. Therefore, the range of legal portnames is restricted. So too  
should be the range of legal version numbers. I'm in favor of getting  
the + out of your version number.