Problem reinstalling packages after Mavericks upgrade - variants conflict

[Peter Brommer]

Hi,

I’ve ran into a problem when reinstalling my macports packages after the upgrade to Mavericks (as suggested in the Migration guide). I’m only installing the packages I actually requested, but now I’ve hit a behaviour which may be a bug. What I did was the following:

Compile a list of of packages and variants that I actually wanted on the new machine. This list contained, among others, "octave +atlas+gcc48” and “inkscape +python27+quartz”.
Issued a single port install command containing this list of packages and variants.

Port install then proceeded to install first octave and, among its dependents, cairo @1.12.16_2+x11. It then failed when installing inkscape, as the requested cairomm +quartz requires cairo +quartz. This problem was not flagged when running a dry-run install.

Now the questions:

Is there any way to find out beforehand that the combination of variants I requested are incompatible? Backtracking the whole install is a pain (and a time-consuming process as well).

Does port install treat multiple requested ports as single transactions? 

Is this intentional or a bug? Should I put in a bug report?

Is there any chance to get a behaviour akin to Fedora’s yum, where all requested ports are installed in a single transaction, i.e. the dependencies of all requested ports are resolved before a single port is installed. This feature would make bulk installs *much* smoother.

Thank you,

Peter