A smarter migration behaviour (was Re: usage numbers for macports vs. homebrew?)

[Davor Cubranic]

The amount of traffic to this list that comes down to “you need to run the migration steps from the [Migration] page” is astounding, and it must be a real drain on the time of those who by now must have answered hundreds of such questions.

It seems to me like we could go a long way toward solving the problem by:

1. saving at install time the output of `uname -r` (OS release) into a file in /opt/local/etc/macports/
2. every time `port` is run, compare the stored with the current value and stop with an error message if they differ (or more likely if they differ in more than the patch level)

The error message could direct the user to the Migration page. (Even better if we had a new `port` action to perform the migration steps automatically, even if it wasn’t particularly picky whether a port is being reinstalled because it was requested or simply active at the time of the migration.)

Would this be a workable solution or am I missing something?

Davor


On Mar 18, 2014, at 8:27 PM, Jeremy Lavergne <jeremy at lavergne.gotdns.org> wrote:

> This mostly already exists: it’s currently only for packages that are installed.
> 
> port echo requested
> port setrequested …
> 
> Presently, to get your between-installs behavior, you’d dump the output of echo requested to a file then read it back in. Hilariously, our Migration page (!!! this is something that should go away !!!) breaks even this! There’s the tiny after-the-fact note you notice once you’ve lost all the information that “oh, I could have done requested instead of everything".
> 
> On Mar 18, 2014, at 23:11, Kevin Reid <kpreid at switchb.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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.)
> 
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