old CLI options removed (was: Re: Two errors compiling wine-devel)

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Sep 2, 2009, at 20:15, Joshua Root wrote:

> On 2009-9-3 10:54, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>>
>
>> For each port that is a dependency of wine, e.g. freetype:
>>
>> sudo port upgrade --force freetype +universal
>>
>> (I think this is the new correct syntax for 1.8.0.)
>
> I'd use --enforce-variants rather than --force to avoid rebuilding
> anything that happens to be universal already.

I guess I don't fully understand what these new options do. Could you  
provide a mapping from the old knowledge we already have of how  
MacPorts 1.7.1 worked to how these new 1.8.0 options fit in?

I must also say I'm unhappy that existing command line mechanisms were  
removed from MacPorts entirely in 1.8.0, rather than for example being  
marked as deprecated and/or printing a warning. I have for some time  
been using "port -ux upgrade" to upgrade ports, because I wanted  
MacPorts to stop on errors, which is what "-x" did. We decided the  
functionality of "-x" was so useful it should be the default in 1.8.0.  
But now when I "port -ux upgrade" I'm just shown the usage message  
(which even still lists the removed "-x" as a valid option -- a bug I  
have already fixed on trunk). It would have been better to keep "-x"  
for a few versions and make it a no-op (or make it print a warning)  
rather than make it fail.

Similarly for rebuilding. I have been using "port -nf upgrade" for  
years to force a rebuild of a port. Now it doesn't do that anymore,  
and you closed my ticket [1] saying it behaves correctly. If there is  
new syntax we prefer now for forcing rebuilds, fine, but it would have  
been nice if MacPorts would have continued to honor the commands it  
has up until 1.8.0 required in order to perform this function. There  
are a few ports (graphviz, graphviz-devel, py26-scipy, pure, pure- 
devel, and webdot) that print messages for the user advising them to  
use "port -nf upgrade" to rebuild something; now those instructions  
are inaccurate.

[1] http://trac.macports.org/ticket/20931