Couldn't a version check be done when a user attempts a
sudo port install <somesoftware>
and only if the MacPorts version is up to date, then the install goes
ahead, otherwise it echoes a "please update" warning?
Mark
--
At 17:10 -0500 7/6/07, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
With some of the fundamental changes that have gone on in MacPorts
1.4.x since the 1.4.0 release, and since we only do downloadable
disk images for the major releases, we have this problem that a lot
of people seem to be downloading 1.4.0 and attempting to use it
before selfupdating and reporting a whole slew of problems to the
list which we then have to diagnose and it's always the same
suggestion to fix it: update MacPorts. Or, people are installing
MacPorts and not realizing that they have to periodically inform it
to update itself. People may be under one of two reasonable
expectations: 1) software keeps itself up to date, or 2) software
that is not updated continues to function. MacPorts does neither: it
doesn't auto-update the base software, but if you update the ports
tree (or do a fresh install of MacPorts, which pulls down a current
ports tree), it may not work with your old version of MacPorts. And
this is a problem I think we should solve.
Below is one such message. Steve says it might be nice if MacPorts
would suggest updating itself if it encounters an error. I think we
can probably do better than that, can't we? Couldn't we have
MacPorts periodically (weekly?) check if a new version of MacPorts
is available, and alert the user to this fact if they haven't run
selfupdate themselves? I don't mean a cron task; I just mean, if the
user happens to be running "port" right now and it's been a week
since the last selfupdate, then print a message. There should be a
file somewhere indicating the last time MacPorts checked its
version, and this file would not exist for new installs, such that
the first time somebody runs "port", it would check to see if it's
outdated.
It wouldn't have to update itself automatically. But it should
inform the user if it is outdated. For those who are paranoid about
apps phoning home, there could be a way to disable this feature.
Something similar could be done for the ports tree, but for that we
probably don't even need to check the server -- we know that ports
get updated very frequently. We could just store the last time that
a sync was done, and if it's been awhile (a day? a week?), alert the
user that they should sync again.
Thoughts?
Begin forwarded message:
From: Steve Dekorte <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: June 7, 2007 02:14:49 CDT
To: Ryan Schmidt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: llvm port problem
On 6 Jun 2007, at 06:36 pm, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
I tried it just now, and llvm 2.0_0 installs just fine for me on
Intel Core 2 Duo with Mac OS X 10.4.9 and MacPorts 1.4.42 and
Xcode 2.4.1.
What MacPorts version do you have? Is your ports tree up to date?
Try "sudo port selfupdate" to update both.
Do you have the latest Xcode?
Thanks Ryan, the port version was the problem. It might save some
frustration and support requests if port suggest what you did when
a port fails.
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