output like "port list all" over the web?

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Mon, 5 Aug 2019 at 02:32, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
>
> That got me to wondering if there's a way to get the equivalent of "port list all", all on one page, over the web; for someone that might not want to
> install MacPorts, but wanted to see what its current versions of all its packages were (and perhaps even generate feedback on availability of newer
> packages), that might be useful.
>
> I can get that on https://www.macports.org/ports.php?by=all but that's not all on one page, and it has a lot of other stuff that makes it more difficult
> to consume as machine-readable.

See
    https://trac.macports.org/wiki/SummerOfCode/2019#webapp
with the temporary deployment at
    http://ec2-52-34-234-111.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/
and API specification being written & discussed at
    https://github.com/macports/macports-webapp/pull/45/files
if you want to do something with machine-readable format.

The API with port names should already work, but the URL might change,
so I would not yet use it for production.

But there's
    rsync://rsync.macports.org/macports/trunk/dports/PortIndex_darwin_18_i386/PortIndex.json
if you want more instantanous information.
(There is a high probability that there's also some http(s) equivalent
of the rsync link, I'm just not sure where.)

Macports also offers something like "port livecheck <expression>"
which you could feed with "port livecheck all" and would tell you
which ports are likely outdated. But lots of those checks are broken
and the command takes "forever" to run. We are working on deploying a
job that would run on regular basis, check for potential updates and
provide reports. That's just not done yet.

I would say that at the moment one of the best sources of information
about outdated OpenSource software might be https://repology.org/

Mojca

PS: I'm not using any other updater. The number of apps I have on the
mac outside of MacPorts is relatively limited, and many of them update
automatically. I just never bothered enough about keeping them up to
date to use an external service for it.