Macports does what I want (?) not what I say

[Enrico Placci]

Hello everybody,
I hope my email does not sound too whiney, my intention is to give constructive feedback, hopefully my frustration won't overshadow that.
I'm writing you from a burning laptop, where macports decided to be too smart and did what it thought I wanted.
A few years ago I absolutely loved how macports did exactly what I told it to do:
# port install myport 
myport is already installed
# port upgrade myport
upgrading myport

I absolutely loved it! Sometimes you just need something quickly and you don't care what version it is. Maybe you just forgot you previously installed it.

Also it didn't upgrade all dependencies unless you asked it to. 
Again, sometimes you want to get some tool compiled quickly and you don't care if a new minor version of gtk is out, the previous one will work just fine.

So what I started doing is I don't update port definitions for months so that I don't have to upgrade half my libraries every time I install a tool, which is quite annoying as I'd like to compile a recent version of the new thing I'm installing, and I'd like to upgrade only the dependencies that need upgrading.

So today I wanted to upgrade percona-toolkit. I did a "port selfupdate" and a "port upgrade percona-toolkit" . 
These are the requirements of percona-toolkit:

-------
Most tools require:

   * Perl v5.8 or newer
   * Bash v3 or newer
   * Core Perl modules like Time::HiRes

Tools that connect to MySQL require:

   * Perl modules DBI and DBD::mysql
   * MySQL 5.0 or newer
-------

So why would I want to upgrade  
ncurses @5.9_1 to @5.9_2
gettext @0.18.2_1 to @0.18.2.1_0
perl @5.12.4_1+dtrace to @5.12.4_2+dtrace
zlib @1.2.7_0 to @1.2.8_0
openssl @1.0.1c_0 to @1.0.1e_1
mysql5 @5.1.66_1 to @5.1.70_0
?

Is there any way I can restore the previous behaviour both in regards to upgrading dependencies and upgrading when I say install?
I'd really love to have back a tool that does what I say not what it believes I want.
I already put this into my aliases
port='port -cn' 
but it obviously doesn't work.

Thank you for this great tool and for reading through my rant!

Regards
Enrico