That's a good point. In fact, the modification timestamp on portlist.tcl is 2025-10-29 05:01, which would seem to indicate that the file hasn't been touched for the past couple of months.
The "illegal byte sequence" error does point to file corruption, but the mystery is how that might have occurred. I did also check the ZFS volume where the virtual disk for my MacPorts development VM is stored, and none of the the weekly scrubs have repaired any bits, nor has any resilvering been performed, which are typically early indicators that a drive might be failing. -- Jason Liu On Wed, Dec 24, 2025 at 9:06 PM Ryan Carsten Schmidt < [email protected]> wrote: > On Dec 24, 2025, at 18:49, Jason Liu wrote: > > > > >> portlist.tcl is a text file, not created by clang, and Jason didn't >> mention running selfupdate so there's no reason why that file should have >> been changed. > > > Sorry, I forgot to mention that. This did, in fact, occur after a > selfupdate. I have my MacPorts development VMs run a selfupdate every night > around 5:00am-ish. > > > Ok but unless that selfupdate resulted in MacPorts base being updated, > that file wouldn't have been touched. > > And if you run selfupdate daily then you'd have updated to the latest > version 2.11.6 weeks ago when it was released. > >
