Port upgrade and existing options

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 16, 2010, at 09:41, Scott Haneda wrote:

> I ran port outdatded and have a pretty good sized list. Some are critical , others not. Critical apps will not get upgraded today.
> 
> Nom critical will.
> 
> Do I need to figure out what options I applied to the outdated ports when I first installed?
> 
> Or for example, if php5 was installed +universal, on port upgrade php5 will it be upgraded with +universal as well as all the other +bits I needed at the time?

Positive variants (e.g. +universal) are recorded in the registry and are thus remembered at upgrade time. (Surely you've been using MacPorts long enough that you've observed this by now?)

Negative variants (i.e. if a port uses default_variants but you don't want that default variant -- e.g. "sudo port install git-core -doc" because you don't want the documentation but git-core specifies "default_variants +doc") are not recorded in registry version 1 so you must specify "-doc" every time you install or upgrade git-core if you still don't want the documentation; you can also put "-doc" in your variants.conf to automate this.

Registry version 2, which Joshua has been working on completing in the past few days, which seems to be in a usable state now in trunk, and which will I believe appear in MacPorts 1.9.0, does record negative variants in the registry so this won't be a problem then.