dealing with ports that can't upgrade

[paul beard]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 2:28 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org>
wrote:

> On Jun 21, 2008, at 4:12 PM, paul beard wrote:
>
>  On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 2:08 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>>
>>  On Jun 21, 2008, at 3:19 PM, paul beard wrote:
>>>
>>>  So I have this problem where I can't upgrade metacity until I get
>>>> Leopard. Is there a way to have MacPorts simply ignore you don't want
>>>> upgraded or that can't be upgraded? Something as simple as a .ignore file in
>>>> the port directory or an entry in a list in ports.conf . . .
>>>>
>>>
>>> There is no such feature at this time.
>>>
>>
>>
>> I suspected not: I'll make an RFE.
>>
>
> Do we really want people ignoring available upgrades? I don't think that's
> a good feature to add.
>
If the upgrade doesn't install, why waste the cycles on it? And if a port's
current version is the only one that works for a given use case, do we want
to force an unwanted upgrade or force a user to downgrade it themselves?
Assume that someone who is using MacPorts knows what they're doing: setting
the ignore flag is not something that can be done by accident and it would
be trivial to display a message listing the ignored ports, so the user could
be reminded that they had thrown that switch.

Let's not get in the habit of thinking for others.


>
>
>  In the case of metacity and other ports similarly situated, why not an OS
>>>> version test, if it's confirmed that Tiger is not suitable build platform?
>>>>
>>>
>>> If the current version of metacity will not be fixed to work on
>>> pre-Leopard, then the port should error out on pre-Leopard OS versions, and
>>> the last Tiger-compatible version of metacity should be resurrected from the
>>> repository and reinstated as a separate port.
>>>
>>
>>
>> I am actually working my way through that: looks like 2.21.2 works, where
>> 2.22 fails.
>>
>>  But if the current metacity can be fixed to work on pre-Leopard, then
>>> that should be done instead.
>>>
>>
>>
>> That sounds like a lot of work: something to do with X.org stuff that is
>> leopard-specific. Seems to me that erroring out based on OS version is the
>> cleanest way to go forward.
>>
>
> OK. Then something like this can be added to the metacity port:
>
>
> platform darwin 7 {
>        pre-fetch {
>                return -code error "${name} requires Mac OS X 10.5 or
> newer."
>        }
> }
> platform darwin 8 {
>        pre-fetch {
>                return -code error "${name} requires Mac OS X 10.5 or
> newer."
>        }
> }
>
>
> However, this will not prevent the port from showing up in the list of
> outdated ports, and it will not enable Tiger users to install the older
> version. For that, the older version of metacity would need to be broken out
> into a new port.
>
>
I leave this decision to the port's maintainers: ideally it would no longer
show up in the list of outdated ports, because it really isn't outdated for
that release of the OS.

-- 
Paul Beard / www.paulbeard.org/
<paulbeard at gmail.com/paulbeard at gmail.com>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/attachments/20080621/2fdf86db/attachment.htm