versions of a port

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jan 18, 2010, at 20:11, Thomas De Contes wrote:

>> Old versions of MacPorts and snapshots of the ports tree are available
>> via http from <http://distfiles.macports.org/MacPorts/> or
>> <http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/downloads/>.
> 
> well, maybe i could get the sources with a computer which has svn, and then make a rsync server with them

You can save yourself the trouble of setting up an rsync server. If all you want is to get the last ports tree that works with an OS version, you're only going to be checking it out once, so you can just copy that over to your older machine and set your sources.conf to point to that directory.


> so, the ports won't stay compatible with 10.4 ? i'll have to get and keep them too ?

Ports are already beginning to become incompatible with 10.4. Port maintainers and upstream software developers are testing on Snow Leopard now, and sometimes still on Leopard, but on Tiger less often. 10.4-specific bugs and incompatibilities are thus more likely to slip in. Whether they can or do get fixed depends on maintainer or developer willingness.

If a future version of MacPorts base becomes incompatible with 10.4, yes, you should then stick with the last set of ports made at that time. Not only will later portfiles assume you are running a supported OS version, later portfiles will also likely use features only available in that later version of MacPorts, so you would otherwise start encountering errors about unknown commands.


I personally am in favor of retaining 10.4 support as long as possible, and at this point we have no concrete plans to stop 10.4 support in base. But there may come a day when a feature is added to base that doesn't work on 10.4 -- like the privilege escalation code that was added last year which made base incompatible with 10.3. Or we may follow our existing habits and make 10.4 unsupported as soon as 10.7 comes out.