force install without a dependency

[Jacob Schwartz]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 4:56 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
>  No. MacPorts is designed to accept only its own ports as satisfying
> dependencies, not any other versions of that software you may already have
> installed.

Can I rephrase my question then?  What if the port maintainer included
a bogus dependency -- in this case, the Haskell-mode for emacs *in no
way* requires the port "ghc".  Absolutely does not require it.  The
Haskell-mode can be very useful to people who never intend to run
"ghc".  What now?  We contact the port maintainer and ask them to fix
the problem and then wait for them to update the macports database
before we install?

I'll go ahead and contact the maintainer and ask them to do that ...
but it would be nice, as a user, to be able to tell "port" that I know
that some information in the portfile is wrong and I'd like to replace
it with a new value.

For example, here's a similar issue that I ran into, involving the
version in the portfile:

The portfile for "yudit" from macports refers to a sunsite location
where the source files can be found and the portfile specifies a
specific version (2.7.6).  The ftp-site put up a new version (2.9.0)
of the source files and *removed* the old version.  I was stuck!  I
couldn't install the port because macports insisted on a particular
version, but the file for that version was no longer available.

However ... The "port" command has an option to search for whether new
versions exist ("livecheck" I think?), and it worked very well: "port"
told me that it found the new version on the website:

  # sudo port livecheck yudit
  yudit seems to have been updated (port version: 2.7.6, new version: 2.9.0)

My question: Is there any way that "port", having found the new
version, can install that version?  I found no mention of this in the
documentation.  So not only could I not install the old version, I
couldn't install the new version!

What do I do in that situation?  Again, I have to contact the port's
maintainer and tell them to update the macports database to the new
version?  In this case, the port has no maintainer, so who do I
contact?

If "port" can know about a new version, why can't it install that
version if I ask it to?  I figured that I could probably create my own
portfile in which everything is the same except that I change the
version number; then I run my own ports server and list it among the
servers in the config file for "port" ... but this seemed like too
much work.  If it's something I could do myself by setting up a local
port server, why can't I have "port" do it on the command line and
save me the effort?

Jacob