Announcing: port_upgrade

[tdoan at tdoan.com]

Mike,

Thank you for the suggestions. Both should be easily done. Look for a new
dot release soon. Glad you found it useful.

\T

> --On May 9, 2009 2:05:41 PM -0700 Tony Doan <tdoan at tdoan.com> wrote:
>
>> Got MacPorts?
>>
>> Do you normally keep things up to date by running "port sync; port
>> upgrade outdated"? Do you then wish there was a problem free way to
>> clean out all the previous versions?
>>
>> Well then... have I got some beta software for you!
>>
>> port_upgrade is a no holds barred brute force way to upgrade your
>> ports tree when things are out of date. port_upgrade crawls your
>> receipts directory and your sources directory and figures out what is
>> out of date. It then builds a dependency tree and uninstalls
>> everything in dependency order then reinstalls everything in reverse
>> order. Along the way you get the most up to date versions of your
>> ports, you are assured higher level ports are compiled against the
>> most recent versions of libraries and generally a nice clean ports
>> tree. You also get quite a long wait while things are recompiled and
>> reinstalled. It preserves specified variants (either specified
>> explicitly or implicitly). If port_upgrade encounters two versions of
>> a port installed where the variants differ you will be prompted which
>> to use.
>
> I think some of the posts regarding this package may have missed the
> point slightly.  If a port is outdated it will rebuild that port and
> all the other ports that depend on it, whether or not those ports are
> also outdated.  I don't think there is any command in MacPorts that
> will do this, but perhaps I'm missing something.
>
> Being one of the (few?) people who installed the X11 ports using the
> +system_x11 variant and who, as a result, needs to rebuild everything
> that depends on anything using that variant, even if it is not
> outdated, this package seems like it would be useful.  I do agree with
> others who have said it would be better if it were part of the base
> MacPorts system.
>
> I tried to use it to clean up after system_x11 and have a couple of
> suggestions for improvements.  First, I had to change the value of
> MACPORTS_DB in port_upgrade.rb since I use SVN to keep the ports data
> base up to date.  There is a parameter to override the location of the
> receipts but I can't find one to override the location of the port
> files.  This would be useful.
>
> It also seems like it would be useful to include a "clean" action in
> the generated shell script that would do a "port clean --work
> --archive" on all the relevant ports.  Or perhaps just include this in
> the "uninstall" action.  If you've installed ports with the autoclean
> option off and MacPorts thinks they aren't out of date, it won't
> rebuild them.
>
>            Mike
>
>