binaries list

[Gregory Seidman]

On Tue, Jul 03, 2012 at 10:52:32PM -0400, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 10:38 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org>wrote:
> > > What I'm looking for is a convenient way to see what versions are
> > > available to be installed and what versions, if any, are installed.
> >
> > "port installed" tells your which ports are installed. You can restrict
> > that, e.g. "port installed zlib" to see which version(s) of the zlib
> > port are installed.
> >
> > "port outdated" tells you which of those ports are outdated. You can
> > restrict that too, e.g. "port outdated zlib" to see if zlib is
> > outdated.
> >
> > There is always only one version of a port available to be
> > installed???the current version. To install older versions, you have to
> > jump through hoops explained here:
> 
> And what is missing from all of this is what I understood your original
> question to be:  what *packages* might be available (which depends on
> variants etc.).  "port list" shows what will build from source; only a
> subset of this is available as binary packages, and even then only for some
> architectures and default variants (and only with the default MacPorts
> prefix of /opt/local).

Exactly. I'd like to have a simple way to ask the following questions about
a package all at once:

1) What versions are installed, if any, and which is active?
2) What version is available to install from a binary, if any?
3) What version is available to install from source?
4) What versions are sitting in my portarchivepath? (is that meaningful?)

Even better would be asking those questions about anything outdated all at
once. And, of course, the output should be both human readable and
reasonably easy to manipulate if piped to a script (i.e. machine-readable).

I take it such a thing does not currently exist. Anyone feeling up to the
challenge?

> brandon s allbery                                      allbery.b at gmail.com
--Greg