port re-building

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 31, 2011, at 10:49, ximon wrote:

> Hi, I noticed that when installing a port recently that existing dependencies were rebuilt. I have been a macports user for some years now and have never noticed this before, by and large macports works very well for me.
> 
> The system is 10.6 with a clean install of macports 1.9.2.

I believe automated rebuilding of tangentially related ports is new for MacPorts 1.9.x. Previously things would just fail with confusing error messages if such a rebuild was required.


> When I first noticed this I wasn't sure if the dependencies were being rebuilt due to the requirements of the port being installed, but now I'm not so sure that this is the case.
> 
> After installing xsane, which has dependencies on tiff & libusb which were also built and installed, I then installed argyll which also has dependencies on tiff & libusb. As the build for argyll progressed it was quite clear that tiff, libusb & libusb-compat were rebuilt even though they were already installed. Before installing argyll, I ran port selfupdate & port upgrade outdated which resulted in one port being upgraded - one of the components of x11 IIRC.

You are probably on a Mac with a 64-bit processor running Snow Leopard, which builds software 64-bit by default in that case. argyll's portfile states that it can only build 32-bit. Therefore all of argyll's dependencies had to be rebuilt with the universal variant -- built for 64-bit and 32-bit -- so that argyll could use them.


> It occurred to me that if ports are being rebuilt in this way that any ports originally built with variant options would be rebuilt without those options - is that right?

No; variants would be preserved.