On Apr 21, 2007, at 03:13, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

On Apr 18, 2007, at 15:20, Dominik Fisch wrote:

...

I've opened ticket #11796 to describe the build problem I experienced while trying to build auctex development variant. After playing around a bit I found the problem within the Portfile and submitted a patch.

http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/ticket/11796

Review and commit, anyone? ;-)

I'm concerned by the proposed patch, as it seems to indicate a deficiency in the base MacPorts system. For those who haven't looked at the ticket, the reported error is:

Error: Error executing devel: can't set "depends_lib": invalid depspec: Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.

And the proposed patch is:

--- Portfile (revision 24279) +++ Portfile (working copy) @@ -23,8 +23,8 @@ depends_lib port:emacs depends_run port:teTeX -variant devel { depends_lib-delete port:emacs - depends_lib-append port:emacs-devel +variant devel { depends_lib-append port:emacs-devel + depends_lib-delete port:emacs }

In other words, apparently if you delete the last item of, for example, depends_lib, using depends_lib-delete, then you cannot depends_lib-append anymore. Or maybe the error already occurs when deleting the last item of the list.

Would any base developers care to comment on whether base should be improved here instead of this portfile patch?

Someone committed the fix in the ticket. However, now we have the same problem reported against another port: http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/ticket/11819 I believe something is amiss in base. Someone who knows about base, please comment.