[MacPorts] #47755: Broken symlink left by select code when selected port is deactivated causes poppler and other ports using aclocal to fail during configuration.

Dominik Reichardt domiman at gmail.com
Wed Jun 24 15:35:00 PDT 2015


> On 25.06.2015, at 00:10, Christopher Ramos <chrisdavidramos at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Macports, like the Mac App Store, is *curated*; it's not the same thing as going to some fly-by-night website, downloading, and installing willy nilly.

But that’s the crucial thing which you don’t seem to understand, it’s exactly that.
Think of git as a downloader. 
Git installs through MacPorts. Nothing bad will happen at this point.
You use git to clone a repository (in other words you are downloading a lot of text files). Nothing bad will happen at this point.
And that’s it. Whatever you are doing now with this repository is up to you. Git has done its part.
It’s almost exactly like going to any website with any browser and downloading *any* software. Once it’s downloaded it (the software) is sitting in your download folder and is doing nothing. The browser is done (it might have unpacked the archive the software came in, though).
You need to actively install or run that software to harm your system. Is that then the browser’s fault?

Back to MacPorts and Git.
So you cloned a repository with Git and nothing bad happens. and Git is done.
Now you will most likely want to do something with the code you cloned. At this time, you will use the autotools or cmake or xcode or whatever to build the program out of the code. Some ways may cause problems further down the line (“make install” for example) but that is certainly never the fault of the download tool. It may be the fault of some script or other compile tool OR the users fault for running “make install” without knowing what will happen next…

When MacPorts uses Git to clone a repository and will then build software from this repository, it IS MacPorts responsibility to make sure nothing bad happens, or rather when something bad happens try to prevent it. But again, the problem is not Git, the problem is elsewhere.

Dom
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