macports 1.7.1 deprecated

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 13, 2009, at 11:38, Rainer Müller wrote:

> On 2009-11-11 16:57 , Dave Provine wrote:
>> I hate to bother you about this, but it appears that macports 1.7.1 is now
>> deprecated; is that correct? When trying to update packages, I'm getting the
>> "invalid command name "license"" error on Mac OS X 10.3.9. I've Googled and
>> searched the wiki/faq, but can find nothing that references the deprecation
>> except for some list traffic around 31 August that talks about moving
>> forward with 1.8.
> 
> As has been noted in the changelog at [1], the support for Mac OS X 10.3
> Panther has been dropped with the release of version 1.8.0. The last
> working version is 1.7.1. But you cannot use the current port tree
> anymore with that old release as it only targets the latest release.

And really, every previous version of MacPorts should be considered deprecated the moment a new version is released. We can't support earlier versions, because as Rainer said, they all share the same ports tree, and ports will be written to use the features available in the latest MacPorts.

Unfortunately, support for Mac OS X 10.3 and earlier was lost after merging in the GSoC 2008 privilege-dropping branch, and the small number of users still using Panther didn't justify the developer resources to restore it.