rebuild a package without an update

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 16, 2020, at 17:58, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
> 
> Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>>> So I have to force the "gcc-4.2" of xcode... that one works (and, luckily, libxml2 still compiles with it)
>> My point is that "sudo port upgrade outdated" should work. If it does not, we may have a bug somewhere that we need to fix, and what you're describing above sounds like we haven't declared dependencies correctly somewhere, or maybe we have a circular dependency. Forcibly rebuilding a port is nice to know how to do, I just wanted to emphasize that it is not a task we expect users to need to do on a regular basis.
>> 
> 
> you are perfectly right! Since I'm am on an old (even is "beloved") OS version, I expect some hiccups, but this is harder.
> However, as I tried to explain, the problem is a bit deep - causing all MacPorts compiler to break is a pain on systems which have an older toolchain. Probably this goes unnoticed on newer macs where the system clang/gcc is "new enough".
> Here were are in the situation that if, for some upstream reason, libxml2 stops compiling with gcc 4.2, the user has no workaround and is stuck in an endless dependency.

If such a situation were to arise, then indeed we would want to do something about it. We do have automated build machines for Mac OS X 10.6 and later so if such a situation did arise we would probably notice it on the build machines. As far as I know, we do not have such a situation at present.