usage numbers for macports vs. homebrew?

Kevin Reid kpreid at switchb.org
Tue Mar 18 20:11:43 PDT 2014


On Mar 18, 2014, at 19:02, Arno Hautala <arno at alum.wpi.edu> wrote:

> Another big one would be handling major OS upgrades more cleanly. I think the two issues are that MacPorts detects certain configurations upon install and generally all ports need to be rebuilt. Making MacPorts detect the OS upgrade, re-detecting and reconfiguring as necessary, and then handling the rebuild would solve a lot.

One of the things that would make even a manual rebuild much more convenient is if MacPorts allowed a port to be “requested” even if it is not installed. (I think I recall that the Debian package manager works in a way like this.)

Then the upgrade process would be closer to

   uninstall *
   install requested

This would also be useful in cases like this where a port is broken (can't be fetched/built/installed); I would like to be able to have a port requested-but-not-installed as a reminder to install it when it is no longer broken. OS upgrades are one of the ways ports end up broken, too.

(If this feature were to exist, it should also remember what variants were requested; I don't know whether the requested-state information currently includes this but I would assume not.)

-- 
Kevin Reid                                  <http://switchb.org/kpreid/>



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