pkg reclaim and versions check

[Ken Cunningham]

On 2019-01-02, at 10:00 AM, Riccardo Mottola wrote:

> Hi Ken.
> 
> Ken Cunningham wrote:
>> It can be risky to use port reclaim for systems that can't use the buildbots as backup, or don't have a buildbot like 10.5 Intel or 10.4 PPC.
>> 
>> You must be quite careful, or you'll be doing a lot of needless rebuilding.
>> 
>> For each port or ports that you know you want, do this:
> 
> 
> sorry for asking more details.. but why should it be risky on 10.4 or 10.5?


I think what happens is that port reclaim doesn't maintain the build dependencies, only the runtime ones (which is what most people need).

So on a system without a buildbot, some things are called in for the build, like clang-5.0 or cmake or gcc7, and they can take a long time to build, esp on 10.5 - 10.6.  And you probably want them to stay around.

But if you install something that needs one of these to build, spend a day building the compiler, then install the software that needs it, and then run port reclaim, the compiler gets flushed.

Next update, you're starting over building clang-5.0, cmake, and whatever else again (because you have no buildbot to save you).

So you have to specifically set these things as "requested" to prevent them being purged with port reclaim.

> 
> First, I'd expect reclaim to remove:
> - installed stuff that is older than the latest installed release (inactive)
> - active stuff, but which was pulled in by otehr packages now removed
> 
> of course without buildbot it is more inconvenient to reinstall something, but why should it happen?
> I everything stays to current, removing something old shouldn't even require arebuild!
> 
> I had a blink light when I saw it wanted to remove soemthing I specifically installed was up to latest version!
> 
> 
> Riccardo
> 
> PS: in case, can I reclaim manually certain inactive ports?


I often do that -- run

port -v installed gcc6

and then uninstall all the versions you don't want any more.


Ken