On Nov 10, 2011, at 11:58 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote: > > On Nov 10, 2011, at 11:50, Phillip Koebbe wrote: > >> Greetings all. This is my first inquiry to this list. I've just been through >> a somewhat painful experience and was wondering if this is the norm and if >> so, can anything be done to make it less painful. > > >> All in all, I spent quite a few hours trying to figure all of this out. I'm >> wondering if this is basically how it goes with MacPorts and trying to use >> older versions of things. Is it possible to specify, in the Portfile, a >> minimum version of dependencies and avoid the installation of the newest >> versions of things, especially when an acceptable version of a dependency is >> already installed? >> >> I apologize if this is an oft-discussed topic. I started by writing a >> message asking for help on how to accomplish what I needed to do, but after >> figuring it all out, I changed it to what it is now. In the beginning, I >> googled around quite a bit looking for information about setting up a PHP >> development environment but didn't find anything specific to using older >> versions of supporting libraries. The only things I found discussed PHP >> proper, not things like php-curl, php-imap, or php-postgresql. > > > Philip, > > Sorry you had trouble. It's not an oft-discussed topic, because most users > don't want old versions, they want current versions. This is probably why it > hasn't been made easier to install old versions in MacPorts. > > The instructions in the wiki for installing an older version of a port are > fine for dealing with just a single port. But you're talking about several > ports which relate to one another. So that's a more complicated operation, > which takes some work on your part, as you discovered. > > I have to run but may have more to add in a couple hours. > >
Thanks for the response, Ryan. I really appreciate the attentiveness and willingness to respond. Well, if this is how it goes, then this is how it goes. I was hopeful that I was just missing something and there might be an easier way to do it. Before I figured out the activate-deactivate trick, I was pretty confused as to how I was going to pull this off. I'm going to look into the snapshot idea offered by Jeremy. I guess I've been a bit spoiled by RubyGems. While definitely not perfect, if you install an acceptable version of a dependency prior to the main gem you want, the newest version won't be installed. Well, I guess I should qualify that with "if the gem's dependencies are defined properly". I've had pretty decent success with maintaining older gems for legacy projects. So I don't sound like an ungrateful snot: thank you to everyone who has worked to make MacPorts what they are. You make my life easier than it would be otherwise. Phillip _______________________________________________ macports-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-users
