On May 28, 2015, at 1:09 PM, Kurt Pfeifle <[email protected]> wrote:
> Ok then: which one of the two switches is the unsafe one? I guess the -f? Or > has the combination of the two even more damage potential? They're both unsafe. "-f" does different things depending on the build phase, but all of them amount to plowing through despite problems. For instance, activating a port usually fails if some of that port's files already exist. Force-activating just overwrites those files. "-p" tells MacPorts to continue processing ports and commands, even on failure. This can cause problems when upgrading a port and its dependencies, as MacPorts will blindly continue to upgrade ports despite their dependencies' builds failures. > I started to make it a habit using them, because so often the upgrade does > not run through to continue with a few hundred other packages because of just > one or two or three packages fail… Ignoring errors is a bad way to handle this situation. You should upgrade more often or uninstall some ports. (And report build failures to us, naturally.) > If the -f (or the combo of -pf) is indeed so terribly unsafe as you say (I do > not doubt your statement, even though I do not understand the reason for it), > then there should be at least one of the following: > > • Add a warning (including the reason for it) to the port manpage. > • Emit a warning on the command line, whenever this option is used. Those are good ideas. vq _______________________________________________ macports-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
