Subversion questions

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 26, 2011, at 13:52, james collins wrote:

> So I was following the wiki tutorial on how to use subversion to update the ports tree.
> 
> I believe I was able to get the port tree using subversion.
> 
> But my terminal wasn't able to properly sync my ports tree. I had edited sources.conf by adding the following line as per wiki instructions.
> 
> file:///opt/local/var/macports/sources/svn.macports.org/trunk/dports/ [default]
> 
> But my macports wasn't syncing, I had all zereos. And macports wasn't recognizing recoll.
> 
> So I edited sources.conf by adding the line
> 
> file:///opt/local/var/macports/sources/svn.macports.org/dports [default]
> 
> I tried that line because that was the directory where my port tree files were located.
> 
> Anyway when I ran the synced command again terminal added a lot of ports at the end I got the following from terminal
> 
> Total number of ports parsed: 12143
> Ports successfully parsed: 12143
> Ports failed: 0
> Up-to-date ports skipped: 0
> 
> I then ran sudo port -d install recoll
> 
> And I was able to download and install recoll and it's dependencies.
> 
> I have a couple of questions:
> 
> Why did changing the path from the wiki article work? 

Sounds like you followed the initial checkout instructions incorrectly, and put the ports tree in a different local directory than the instructions said to. Then you updated sources.conf to refer to that location, so now things are working and you can get on with installing the ports you want.


> Did sync work correctly, why didn't terminal recognize the ports from the ports tree? 

Now that the location in sources.conf matches the location where the working copy is on disk, everything should be fine.


> It seemed to re-download the files from the ports tree?

"sudo port sync" will run "svn update" which will download any changes from the repository. It won't download everything each time, only what has changed since last time you synced.


> When my macports recognized the install recoll command did it use subversion? Or did rsync just start working? Can you install a port without rsync?

When we're talking about rsync vs subversion vs straight http we're just talking about the method by which the ports tree (the set of recipes for installing ports) gets on your computer. Now that you've resolved that issue and the ports tree is successfully downloaded to your computer, MacPorts can install the ports described by those recipes. Installing ports does not use rsync or svn, usually. If a binary of a port is available, it is fetched from our packages server using http. If a binary is not available, MacPorts will fetch the source and build it. Sources are usually fetched via http(s) or ftp, though some ports may use svn, git, hg, bzr, or cvs, as necessary for that particular project's hosting situation.