MacPorts related questions

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 12, 2017, at 01:31, iEFdev wrote:

> Hello Ryan,
> 
> I hope it's ok to send you an email… I have a few questions I'd like to get help with, &/or directions where to go, if possible. And they're not bugs so I don't know if to make a ticket of them.

Hi Eric. You should write to the macports-users mailing list for help using MacPorts. I'm Cc'ing that address now so my reply will appear there. If you want to reply, please Reply All, and make sure you're subscribed to that list first so that your reply does not bounce.


> Long story short… I have a few programs now that won't update:
> 
> [me at myhost] ~$  port echo outdated
> go                             @1.6.3_0 
> ntfs-3g                        @2015.3.14_0 
> osxfuse                        @3.6.3_0 
> py35-flake8                    @3.3.0_1 
> py35-pylint                    @1.7.2_0 
> py36-flake8                    @3.3.0_1 
> py36-Pillow                    @4.2.1_0 
> py36-pylint                    @1.7.2_0 
> 
> - - -
> 
> Well, “go” is a no-go, since it won't upgrade with my Lion. So, I guess I'm stucked with that one

Yes, the go port now requires Mountain Lion or newer.

The go-1.4 port still exists for installing go version 1.4 on any system. But, this is only useful for your own personal use; other ports that require go will not attempt to use go-1.4 so they won't be installable on Lion or earlier anymore either.

Lion is old. If possible on your Mac, please consider upgrading to a newer version of macOS.


> I've really searched the website and the documentation. I saw somewhere one could put something in the end of the command to exclude X port from upgrading. Isn't there a better way? It would be nice with a file where you could blacklist programs from upgrading, like there's variants.conf to pre-set like “+nonls”, etc. Perhaps that one can be used as well? but using that command instead? But anything to hide it from the list with outdated programs would be nice.

Yes, you can construct lists of ports by exclusion on the command line, for example:

sudo port upgrade outdated and not go

But this will not automatically exclude other outdated ports you may have installed that depend on go, and when it comes time to upgrade those other ports, they will attempt to upgrade the go dependency first, which, if you're on Lion, will fail. So you would have to exclude those other ports too. For example, if you have mongo-tools installed, which depends on go, and you want to upgrade outdated ports but exclude go and mongo-tools, you could run:

sudo port upgrade outdated and not \( go mongo-tools \)

No, there is no configuration file in which you could specify a list of ports to exclude. I don't think we really want to go down the path of making that easier, because MacPorts was designed with the expectation that you will upgrade all of your ports, and selectively excluding ports can lead to problems. I realize that the current versions of ports available in MacPorts can't always be installed on older systems. I don't have a good answer for that, other than recommending you upgrade your OS.


> - - -
> Bumping rules?
> I have this bug ticket open: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/55187 - where you were kind to make it assigned, and fixed the keywords, etc.
> 
> Haven't heard anything in 2 weeks now. Is there any “protocol” how to bump tickets. It's fo the ntfs-3g and osxfuse.

Looks like Dan, the maintainer of the failing port, osxfuse, hasn't responded to the ticket. It's fine to send a message to the macports-dev mailing list asking if another developer could look into it.


> - - -
> 404's?
> 
> The rest of them are all returning 404's. I know it can take a while before everything has synced across the MacPorts-system. It's been a few weeks though. Perhaps I should report that?
> 
> Some are missing, and some do exist, but still returns a 404. Since all are py*-* programs, there's a pattern to it. Maybe I've missed something, that there's been a change or something? I just trying to upgrade.
> 
> I did try to uninstall one (py27-pylint), to reinstall it. But it's still a 404 - so now I'm without that one. A bit frustrating, kind of.

Some software projects have upgraded their distribution web servers to require newer SSL/TLS features than the version of openssl on some older versions of macOS understands, so MacPorts can't fetch the distfiles from those servers on those versions of macOS. The Python project made such a change to their servers earlier this year which made it impossible to access their servers using the version of openssl on Mountain Lion and earlier.

This didn't used to be a problem, because we would copy the distfiles to our own server which uses a configuration that old OS versions can still talk to. But we are not automatically mirroring new distfiles at this time. I would like to get this back online soon, which will solve this problem. The issue is tracked here:

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/53347

I have manually mirrored the distfiles for the specific Python ports you mentioned, so you should now be able to install them on Mountain Lion or earlier.


> If you have any help or pointers on how to solve/go on with this, I'd appreciate that very much. Feeling a bit lost at the moment.
> 
> Best regards,
> · Eric F, Sweden
> 
> // iEFdev (Eric F)