ASSP out of date

Bryan Blackburn blb at macports.org
Wed Nov 5 22:52:53 PST 2008


On Wed, Nov 05, 2008 at 09:15:40PM -0800, Scott Haneda said:
> Thanks Bryan, see comments below:
>
> On Nov 5, 2008, at 8:05 PM, Bryan Blackburn wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Nov 05, 2008 at 07:08:17PM -0800, Scott Haneda said:
>> [...]
>>>
>>> This is my first effort to make a port update file locally on my  
>>> machine,
>>> so be gentle :)
>>
>> For a first Portfile, this is a bad choice, it does nearly all steps
>> manually (configure, no build, and destroot are all there in the  
>> Portfile).
>
> Can you elaborate a little on this, I am not sure I understand what you 
> mean.  What would you suggest I do?  I already have ASSP running via hand 
> compile, but wanted to use this as a way to possibly supply a working 
> install back to the community.  Same with mrtg as well, but I have a 
> feeling mrtg may be a little harder, even though I also have that working 
> as well by hand compiling it and dependencies.

MacPorts by default assumes "extract the file, run configure, make, make
install" to do an install of a given port.  When this works, the Portfile is
really short and simple.  When software starts to diverge from that is when
Portfiles begin to get more complicated.  They still aren't too bad if some
of those steps work.  However, once you get to something like assp which
doesn't have a configure script or even a Makefile, then you have to do all
the heavy lifting yourself.

Of course, if you've been able to install something successfully by hand,
that gets you quite a way towards a working Portfile.  At that point, the
Portfile just becomes a reproduction of what it was you did by hand by
overriding various phases.  assp does most of the work in its destroot phase
so you could put most of what you did by hand in this section.  However,
since the port has a history, you're also having to deal with that, which is
why it seems starting from scratch might be simpler.

Note that the mrtg port is actually simpler than assp, so you might want to
try updating that and attaching the diff to the ticket you filed for it, I'm
sure the maintainers would appreciate the effort (and port updates tend to
happen faster in most cases with patches).

Bryan
[...]



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