selfupdate fails

Ryan Schmidt ryandesign at macports.org
Mon Aug 17 18:50:28 PDT 2015


On Aug 17, 2015, at 8:35 PM, Michael David Crawford wrote:

> On Monday, August 17, 2015, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> Yes, you can change what servers MacPorts uses:
>> 
>> https://trac.macports.org/wiki/Mirrors
>> 
>> If you can set up an rsync server on your network, and that server can connect to our master server via rsync to mirror its contents, then that could work.
> 
> The people who maintain the firewall or would set up the server may not have a clue about the Macintosh, let alone MacPorts.
> 
> The required managerial sign-off may not have a clue about computers of any sort.  I have even seen this at Apple and Microsoft.  You could facilitate their sign-off by providing a PDF with an executive summart;  MacPorts fans could send them via Internal snail mail to corporate.

Note that no understanding of MacPorts or OS X is required. I don't think any of the MacPorts servers (except the buildbot builders), nor any of the mirrors, are running on OS X. All that's required is the ability to set up an rsync server, configure it to allow your internal users to access it using the rsync protocol, and allow it to access our server using the rsync protocol, and configure a recurring task (i.e. cron job) to periodically mirror the information from whichever categories of our server are desired (MacPorts base source code; portfiles source code; source distfiles; precompiled binary archives). There is an email we've prepared in response to questions about how to set up mirror servers, which I can send to you, if you want to go that route. Ideally we would put this information in the public wiki, we just haven't done that yet.

If setting up an internal server is not desired, it's not necessary, you just won't be able to use the selfupdate command, because the selfupdate command requires the ability to connect to an rsync server. In the absence of that ability, you can do both of the following:

1. configure MacPorts to sync from http or https tarball or Subversion repository and periodically run "sudo port sync" to update the portfiles; and
2. whenever a new version of MacPorts is released, download it from our web site and install it.



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