A general upgrade question

[Ryan Schmidt]

> On Sep 23, 2016, at 09:41, William H. Magill <magill at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> I have two systems, an iMac and a Mac Mini. 
> The iMac doesn’t do much - mostly aspell, and so my update to Sierra went quite smoothly. 
> 
> The Mac Mini on the other hand, is a bit more of a workhorse. Primarily acting as a web server.
> And, as I updated to Sierra, I discovered to my chagrin that I had been practicing —If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. 
> Evidently not updating any ports since I upgraded to El Capitan!
> Oops.
> 
> To make a long story short. 
> Instead of first checking to see what kind of updating I needed to do before tackling the new Mac Ports, I just went ahead
> and followed the migration guide.
> Everything went smoothly until I hit the rebuiild phase:  ./restore_ports.tcl myports.txt
> 
> This command itself worked well — what happened was that the rebuild through lots of warning errors.
> Typically of the type:
> 
> Error: p5.16-perl-ostype has been replaced by p5.22-perl-ostype; please install that instead.
> Error: org.macports.configure for port p5.16-perl-ostype returned: obsolete port

Yup, those are obsolete, replaced by newer perl versions. 


> In investigating, I noted that the command:
>> sudo port outdated
> No installed ports are outdated.
> 
> But that this command:
>> sudo port obsolete
> Error: Unrecognized action "port obsolete”
> 
> That behavior seems to be a bug, but I don’t know the expected behavior.

That's not a bug: "outdated" is a MacPorts subcommand; "obsolete" isn't. 

"outdated" is one of many MacPorts subcommands that prints lists of ports formatted in different ways. Other MacPorts list commands include "list", "installed" and "echo". "list" defaults to showing all ports. "echo" defaults to showing no ports. "installed" defaults to showing installed ports. "outdated" defaults to showing outdated ports. You can instruct any of the list commands to list a different set of ports. For example, you could "port echo obsolete" or "port installed name:^p5.16-". 


> At any rate, what I was attempting to do was generate a list of those obsolete and therefore failed installs
> to make manual installation possible.
> 
> In particular, I’m assuming that there is a parent install which included these as dependencies, and that if I
> re-installed that, it would pick-up all of the others. 
> (I seem to have had a bunch of P5.16 modules installed, which should have been updated before I tried to begin the overall update.)
> 
> Is there an obvious way to find that parent?

Not sure.