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

[Paulo Moura]

On 2007/05/10, at 15:10, Daniel J. Luke wrote:

> On May 10, 2007, at 5:36 AM, Paulo Moura wrote:
>> there is not whitespace preceding the last "+". Therefore, it  
>> should not confuse MacPorts. Making "+" an illegal character is  
>> just the wrong way of fixing what seems to be a parsing bug in  
>> MacPorts. The only illegal characters should be the ones that  
>> result in invalid file names (as this would lead to problems when  
>> creating archives at the file system level).
>
> I'm sure we'd be happy to accept a patch which improved the parsing :)

I would be happy to provide one but I'm a Logtalk/Prolog programmer,  
not a Tcl programmer.

>>> I'm in favor of getting the + out of your version number.
>>
>> The "3.0.1+" version number is not something I control as is used  
>> by the third-party software. This software install on a directory  
>> named after this version number. Using a different version number  
>> in the portfile results in a broken installation.
>
> Does it just extract to a folder with a + in it? If so, you could  
> specify worksrcdir in your Portfile.

The problem is not the folder the software it extracts to but the  
folder that is created during installation. I could try to patch the  
original software but that's beside the point.

>> Moreover, what is important here is to fix the MacPorts parsing  
>> bug uncovered by my portfile, not finding a workaround for some  
>> specific portfile that only a few people care about.
>
> The bug may be just that we didn't specify that + is not allowed in  
> version.

What should be specified, IMO, is that the version variable should  
not be set to a string that is invalid as a filename. I agree that  
this current limitation of MacPorts should be documented in order to  
avoid porfile writers being trapped in this bug. This is a relatively  
minor issue and I expect the priority of this bug to be set  
accordingly. Thanks to all for the feedback on this issue. I will try  
to convince the original software authors to change the version  
number to something without a "+".

All the best,

Paulo


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Paulo Jorge Lopes de Moura
Dep. of Computer Science, University of Beira Interior
6201-001 Covilhã, Portugal

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