versions of a port

Ryan Schmidt ryandesign at macports.org
Tue Jan 19 12:49:49 PST 2010


On Jan 19, 2010, at 09:27, Thomas De Contes wrote:

> Le 19 janv. 10 à 03:59, Joshua Root a écrit :
> 
>> Why even check it out with svn? Just use the appropriate archive tarball.
> 
> thank you for the link, it should be fine :-)
> sorry, i didn't look at it seriously enough, like ryan

Yes, I knew we had those port collections somewhere, but I've never used them and forgot what we had called them. Thanks, Joshua, for pointing them out to me.


> (why are there both .gz and .bz2 ?

They should be the same data, bz2 is just better compression than gz. Presumably we're doing this so the files can be used even on systems that don't have bzip2, but I don't know if there are any systems that MacPorts supports today that have this deficiency. I would think pretty much everybody has bzip2 these days.


> what's the difference between MacPorts-1.8.0-archive.tar and MacPorts-1.8.0.tar ?)

MacPorts-1.8.0.tar.* is the MacPorts base source code. MacPorts-1.8.0-archive.tar.* is the archive of ports that goes with MacPorts base 1.8.0. I would claim the word "archive" isn't totally clear here, and it might have been clearer if we had used the word "ports", e.g. "MacPorts-1.8.0-ports.tar.bz2".


> on top of that, the last time i was unlucky, because my old computer broke down 2 months before 10.5 come out,
> so now my extended guarantee is still running while my OS is no longer supported :-(
> 
> (i just call apple to ask about 10.6, and they told me that i'd have to buy RAM)

If you have trouble with a port under 10.4, you can let me know and I'll try to have a look at it; others may not care so much about 10.4 anymore, but I will try.

Still, upgrading to 10.6 is really a very good idea for any Intel Mac. It's a much faster and more stable operating system, and it only costs US$29.

Snow Leopard requires 1 GB RAM. If you have less, definitely upgrade. My advice is to shove as much RAM into your computer as will go, since RAM is so cheap and is the easiest way to improve performance. When I upgraded, I replaced all my computer's RAM with two new 2 GB sticks for a total of 4 GB for only US$50. (If you have an older Intel Mac, it might only support 3 GB RAM -- check the specs before you buy.) Because I was running out of storage space, I also got a new 500 GB internal hard drive for only US$90 (since a full hard drive is a slow hard drive). I found these upgrades quite a bargain compared to the price of a new Mac and given how much it would improve my old Mac's performance, and recommend you consider upgrading at least your RAM as well.



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