Portfile versioning question

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 14, 2010, at 18:52, Ted Wood wrote:

> Hi Ryan,
> 
> Honestly, I tried my darndest to find an answer to this question myself, but lo and behold, I've come up empty, so I'm wondering if you can enlighten me.
> 
> Port files have strange version (or build?) numbers. Here's an example of apache2 showing that my installed version is outdated.
> 
> apache2           2.2.14_0 < 2.2.14_1
> 
> Question -- What do the _0 and _1 suffixes indicate? I can't find an answer to that anywhere online. It would be great if MacPorts.org answered that and the answer was easy to find.
> 
> 
> Thanks for any help,
> 
> ~Ted

Hi Ted. I'm sending this reply not only to you but also to macports-users so others looking for the answer will find it in the archives. Let's continue any further discussion there. That's also a good place to ask other similar questions about how MacPorts works.

The number after the underscore is the portfile revision. Portfile authors may decide to make a change to how the software is packaged that doesn't involve a new version of the software; in that case, the revision gets increased. In the specific case of apache2 @2.2.14_1, the change w.r.t. apache2 @2.2.14_0 was that ccache was turned off for this port. I haven't used ccache so I don't know how it works or what it does, and I'm not sure if that change really necessitated a revision bump, but the committer of that revision thought it did. Probably, if you had not already enabled ccache in macports.conf, there will be no difference for you between these two revisions of apache2 2.2.14.

http://trac.macports.org/changeset/63263/trunk/dports/www/apache2

If you have suggestions specifically for how the documentation could be improved to include this information, please let us know.