New MacPorts ports database site

[Mojca Miklavec]

Dear Chris,

On Mon, 19 Aug 2019 at 11:52, Chris Jones wrote:
>
> Looks great. One question though, how are the port dependencies
> determined exactly?

At the moment they are sadly only taken from a single OS, but it
should be the latest one.

The source of information is here:
    http://nue.de.rsync.macports.org/macports/release/ports/PortIndex_darwin_18_i386/PortIndex.json

> I ask as the site does not seem to happen ports
> where the deps are OS dependent. For instance
>
> <https://ports.macports.org/port/root6/?tab=summary>
>
> lists clang-8.0 as a build dep,  but this is only correct on < macOS 10.13.

I'm not behind my mac now, but what does you portindex entry say for
root6 (it's just a slightly more compressed format than the one linked
above). The above linked file lists
    ["path:bin/cmake:cmake","port:gcc9","port:pkgconfig","port:clang-8.0"]

Now, I'm not sure what OS version is running on the machine that is
generating PortIndex (Ryan might be able to tell that). It could be
that there is a flaw in the code that generates portindex for a
different OS version.


On an "unrelated note": I did think of potential issues with ports
behaving in completely different ways on different OS versions, but it
seemed to me that it was way more important to implement one simple
and stable solution now than end up with way too complicated design
that would never even be finished in the scope of the summer and
potentially never deployed.

We can still think of how we could improve the application in the
future to take different OS versions into account, I just felt that
this was somewhat non-trivial to do right, and a disproportional
effort compared to the benefits it would bring. We also lack
information about dependencies for individual variants, which would be
another super useful information to have, but it's missing from
portindex at the moment, so it's also less trivial to add it.

Mojca

> On 19/08/2019 5:17 am, Joshua Root wrote:
> > MacPorts' new ports database is live at <https://ports.macports.org/>.
> > Please consider installing the "mpstats" port to enable submission of
> > anonymous information about your system and installed ports for
> > statistical purposes.
> >
> > The information collected is currently:
> > * MacPorts version
> > * OS name and version
> > * CPU architecture
> > * Selected C++ standard library
> > * Xcode, command line tools, and GCC versions
> > * Name, version, selected variants, and requested status of each
> > installed port
> > * A UUID so we can tell whether submissions are from distinct users
> >
> > The site also shows which OS versions each port was successfully built
> > on, has links to open Trac tickets, and more.
> >
> > This new site is the result of much hard work by our GSoC student,
> > Arjun Salyan. We hope you find it useful.
> >
> > Josh
> > (on behalf of the MacPorts Port Managers)
> >