Good day everyone! I am glad to announce that after a long delay in extensive testing, MacPorts 1.6.0 has finally been released! It is available through all of our regular channels: -) selfupdate for existing users; -) universal pkg installers for both Leopard and Tiger (PPC pkg for Panther will be forthcoming); -) source tarballs for those wanting to install from source; Browse over to http://www.macports.org/install.php to learn how to use any of the above installation alternatives. Quoted below is the contents of our in-source NEWS file, detailing what is an amazing MacPorts release, full with even completely redesigned and refreshed website and guide. Enjoy and don't hesitate to give us as much feedback as you can, following our also revamped ticketing guidelines at http://guide.macports.org/#project.tickets for the proper filing of problem reports at our Trac portal, http://trac.macports.org Thanks to everyone who helped make this release such an incredible one one, keep up the great work! -jmpp === NEWS === What's new: *) Revived and thoroughly refreshed web presence at http://www.macports.org/ , with more improvements still on the way; *) New project guide at http://guide.macports.org Overview of Changes from MacPorts 1.5.2 to MacPorts 1.6.0: # For regular usage: *) Fixed the "upgrade" target of the port(1) command to properly handle installed versions beginning with letters; *) Improved the "variants" target of the port(1) command to behave like the "info" target to poll the requested Portfile directly rather than the index for more up-to-date information, while also providing a --index flag for legacy behavior; *) Fixed a bug by which a user specific 'macports.conf' file would not be read; *) Tightened security by installing MacPorts in 0755 mode (no write permission for group and others) by default; *) Added 'none' as a possible option for supported types of startupitems scripts; *) Disabled readline support in interactive mode of the port(1) command by deafult; *) Fixed a bug by which the "variants" target of the port(1) command would spit out an error backtrace to the terminal when no match was found for the requested port; *) Revamped the "postflight" script that takes care of setting a MacPorts-compatible shell environment after installation from our "pkg" is complete; it now gracefully handles the addition of PATH, MANPATH and DISPLAY environment variables separately and only if strictly needed, properly backing up appropriate shell configuration files before proceeding to modify them (http://guide.macports.org/#installing.binary.postflight.details for more information); # Individual port-building related improvements: *) Eugene Pimenov's GSoC2007 work on improving "trace mode" for the building of ports in clean environments, http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/wiki/soc2007/epimenov ; *) Added 'bsdmake' and 'gnumake' defaults for building ports on the FreeBSD and Linux platforms; *) Added 'configureccache' and 'configuredistcc' configuration options to the main 'macports.conf' for distributed builds (defaulting to no); *) Improved building of configure-based universal ports on Leopard; *) Fixed a bug by which the 'universal' variant would disappear if a 'macosx' variant was selected; *) Added a 'macosx_deployment_target' option to the main 'macports.conf' file for ports that benefit form this Mac OS X specific flag; *) Added a 'configurepipe' option to the main 'macports.conf' file for using pipes rather than intermediate files when compiling C/C++ based ports; *) Removed LD_PREBIND & LD_PREBIND_ALLOW_OVERLAP variables from MacPorts' environment to prevent prebinding of binaries, which can be harmful on Tiger and above; # Packaging related improvements: *) Created pkg's no longer have /etc, /var/ or /tmp directories in them; *) Fixed a bug by which all .mpkg packages were missing their welcome page; *) Fixed a bug by which HTML contents were written as a pkg's Welcome.rtf file, causing it to not display at all; *) Made the homepage clickable in a pkg's welcoming screen; *) Added support lzma compression for archives; *) Improved pkg & dmg creation on Leopard, for both Intel and PowerPC platforms; *) Added an 'mdmg' target, for the creation of a dmg for a port and its dependencies; *) Dramatically improved performace of the port(1) command's Portfile level actions like "file", "dir", "work" and "url" # For Portfile writers: *) Added more compiler suites as options to the 'configure.compiler' Portfile option; *) Added 'configure.fflags' 'configure.fcflags' 'configure.f90flags' Portfile options for Fortran based ports; *) Added 'configure.javac' and 'configure.classpath' Portfile options for Java ports; *) Added 'configure.objc' 'configure.objcflags' Portfile options for Objective-C based ports; *) Added 'build.nice' and 'build.jobs' Portfile options for parallel builds and build prioritizing; *) Added 'startupitem.netchange' boolean flag Portfile option for generated startup scripts; *) Added a "lint" target to the port(1) command, for Portfile verification and beautification; *) Added Portfile group code for Python 3.0 based ports and deprecated the plain 'python' group code; *) Added generic GNU livecheck rules; *) The "x86" platform has been normalized as "i386"; *) Added a 'use_parallel_build' Portfile option for declaring if a particular port can be built in paralel through make's -j flag, defaulting to no; *) Added 'configure.awk', 'configure.bison', 'configure.pkg_config', 'configure.pkg_config_path' Portfile options to point to the relevant programs/paths to use; *) Added a 'extract.mkdir' Portfile option to better deal with so- called "tar bombs"; *) Added a 'configure.pipe' Portfile option for using pipes rather than intermediate files when compiling C/C++ based ports; # For MacPorts scripting: *) Moved the 'ui_isset' and 'global_option_isset' Tcl procedures for testing of the UI and global options to the macports1.0 API sparing its clients from having to implement them; *) Improved defaults for implicit ui_prefix and ui_channels behaviour at the macports1.0 layer; # Miscellaenous: *) Added MacPorts-configure time checks for Mac OS X and Xcode versions and warnings for old versions; *) Added a 'user-agent' parameters to our libcurl based fetching of sources for sites that require a user agent; *) 'livecheck' regular expressions are now checked against each entry in the listed master_site in the Portfile; *) Fixed regexp in livecheck code to work when there is both a tag and a subdir in the mirror uri; *) Improved the integrated "daemondo" program to better handle the death of startupitem-based programs; *) Added a "--restart-wait=n" argument to the integrated "daemondo" program to control the number of seconds to wait during restart of the process it is monitoring, defaulting to 3; *) Enabled building of our objc bridge against GNUStep on platforms other than Mac OS X; *) Added support for packing of MacPorts itself on FreeBSD and Fedora platforms; *) Added SourceForge.jp to our list of SourceForge based mirrors for sources fetching; *) Added http mirror sites for the postgresql mirrors list; *) Added the ftp://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/ mirror to the GNU mirrors list; *) Fixed a bug by which paths with embedded spaces would cause the "dp2mp-move" upgrade code to fail when trying to find user specific 'macports.conf' files;