Upgrade wants unnecessary dependency

[Dave Allured - NOAA Affiliate]

diffutils-for-muniversal is coming from the muniversal portgroup.  You must
somehow be invoking the +universal variant of expat, in your port update
command.

It appears that diffutils-for-muniversal has no other dependencies.  My
guess is that is safe to allow diffutils-for-muniversal to be installed.
It is only a build dependency, so you should be able to uninstall it if you
want, following a successful expat build.


On Mon, Jul 27, 2026 at 10:22 PM Seth McDonald via macports-users <
macports-users at lists.macports.org> wrote:

> G'day!
>
> I currently have a few outdated ports I want to upgrade, including expat
> (2.8.1_0 -> 2.8.2_0).  Running `port upgrade expat`, port attempts to
> install diffutils-for-muniversal as a dependency.
>
>         $ sudo port upgrade expat
>         The following port will be upgraded:
>          expat
>
>         The following new port will be installed as a dependency:
>          diffutils-for-muniversal
>         Continue? [Y/n]:
>
> However, expat does not appear to have any dependencies.
>
>         $ port deps expat
>         expat @2.8.2_0 has no dependencies.
>
> So I'm puzzled as to why port wants to install diffutils-for-muniversal.
> I'm also unsure if this is an issue with either port or with the port
> program itself, which is why I'm asking about it here.
>
> It's possible it relates to me recently configuring MacPorts to build
> ports from source by default, but I would think diffutils-for-muniversal
> would still show up as a build dependency for expat in that case.
>
> Any ideas why this could be happening?  I'm happy to provide more info
> about my configuration if needed.
>
> Take care,
>         Seth McDonald.
>
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