> On Jan 22, 2022, at 11:13, Ryan Schmidt <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Jan 22, 2022, at 09:36, Richard L. Hamilton wrote: > >> I have no idea of the difficulty of such a change, but it would be >> interesting if Portfiles contained a release date, and the database of >> installed ports had both a copy of that for any given installed version, and >> perhaps the date of installation. > > The registry stores installation dates. > > $ port -v installed zlib > The following ports are currently installed: > zlib @1.2.11_0 (active) requested_variants='' platform='darwin 19' > archs='x86_64' date='2021-11-12T12:14:43-0600' > > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > > Release date information is not available in MacPorts. Are you proposing that > the maintainer of every port should do research to discover the release date > every time they want to update a port to a new version and add that > information to a new field in the portfile? Why? > > Or are you referring to the date when an update of a portfile was committed > to GitHub? If so, why would that be useful to you?
The latter, since the former, although possibly more useful, is too difficult. Ideally, one has active the latest available version of a port, esp. given dependencies. But that doesn't always build, nor even always fail on first use after being built. Some might wish to let stuff age a bit for stability's sake, but not excessively, and dates might help with that. A possible alternative: a reasonably easy way to keep only the most recent X inactive versions of a port with a given set of variants. That way one could keep things reasonably clean but have something to fall back to. If there's a non-manual way to do that (short of a creative script that digests the output of "port installed"), I must have missed it.
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