What have I forgotten about specifying which Perl should be /opt/local/bin/perl?

[Richard L. Hamilton]

> On Jan 22, 2022, at 11:13, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Jan 22, 2022, at 09:36, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
> 
>> I have no idea of the difficulty of such a change, but it would be interesting if Portfiles contained a release date, and the database of installed ports had both a copy of that for any given installed version, and perhaps the date of installation.
> 
> The registry stores installation dates.
> 
> $ port -v installed zlib
> The following ports are currently installed:
>  zlib @1.2.11_0 (active) requested_variants='' platform='darwin 19' archs='x86_64' date='2021-11-12T12:14:43-0600'
>                                                                                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> 
> Release date information is not available in MacPorts. Are you proposing that the maintainer of every port should do research to discover the release date every time they want to update a port to a new version and add that information to a new field in the portfile? Why?
> 
> Or are you referring to the date when an update of a portfile was committed to GitHub? If so, why would that be useful to you?

The latter, since the former, although possibly more useful, is too difficult.

Ideally, one has active the latest available version of a port, esp. given dependencies. But that doesn't always build, nor even always fail on first use after being built. Some might wish to let stuff age a bit for stability's sake, but not excessively, and dates might help with that.

A possible alternative: a reasonably easy way to keep only the most recent X inactive versions of a port with a given set of variants. That way one could keep things reasonably clean but have something to fall back to. If there's a non-manual way to do that (short of a creative script that digests the output of "port installed"), I must have missed it.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 2814 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-users/attachments/20220122/5a4cdaa0/attachment.bin>