#51799: add a concept of 'distributions' for ports that work on specific older architectures -------------------------------------+-------------------------------- Reporter: kenneth.f.cunningham@… | Owner: macports-tickets@… Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: Normal | Milestone: Component: base | Version: 2.3.4 Resolution: | Keywords: Port: | -------------------------------------+-------------------------------- Comment (by ryandesign@…): We barely have the manpower to correctly maintain our existing single collection of ports; we certainly don't have the manpower to maintain separate distributions for different versions of Mac OS X (or, as has been requested elsewhere, stable and unstable distributions). What would happen is that developers would update the latest and greatest port collection, while the other port collections would not receive timely updates. The consequence would be that users using those other port collections would receive unnecessarily outdated or buggy software. Instead, I would like to keep our single distribution, and update ports and fix bugs as they're found. We do provide frozen port collections every time we release a new major version of MacPorts. They're in the [https://distfiles.macports.org/MacPorts/ download directory] and have names ending with "-archive". However, there are no guarantees with these frozen port collections that they work on any particular version of Mac OS X, which is the same situation as our live up to date ports collection. -- Ticket URL: <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/51799#comment:1> MacPorts <https://www.macports.org/> Ports system for OS X

#51799: add a concept of 'distributions' for ports that work on specific older architectures -------------------------------------+-------------------------------- Reporter: kenneth.f.cunningham@… | Owner: macports-tickets@… Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: Normal | Milestone: Component: base | Version: 2.3.4 Resolution: | Keywords: Port: | -------------------------------------+-------------------------------- Comment (by raimue@…): There are no guarantees that ports work at all as all users are on the live version. Port updates are distributed over selfupdate almost immediately after they were committed to the repository. So even on the latest version of OS X, ports may break sometimes. On what you could do to improve the situation for Snow Leopard, you could provide an [https://guide.macports.org/#development.local-repositories overlay of the ports tree] that pins ports to the last known good version (as an alternative, they could be "pinned" in the Portfile in a `platform` block). That should only be done if newer versions cannot be fixed in some way through patches. However, as soon as a port no longer works on Snow Leopard, dependents may also break as soon as they require new features. I am not sure there are enough users interested in contributing to these legacy systems at all. Do you have any examples where ports could not be fixed for Snow Leopard? Often enough it requires someone to debug the issue and provide a patch. Personally, I won't work or care for issues for anything older than two releases of OS X (at the moment, that would be 10.9 Mavericks), but will happily accept any patches for these systems. -- Ticket URL: <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/51799#comment:3> MacPorts <https://www.macports.org/> Ports system for OS X

#51799: add a concept of 'distributions' for ports that work on specific older architectures -------------------------------------+-------------------------------- Reporter: kenneth.f.cunningham@… | Owner: macports-tickets@… Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: Normal | Milestone: Component: base | Version: 2.3.4 Resolution: | Keywords: Port: | -------------------------------------+-------------------------------- Comment (by kenneth.f.cunningham@…): Ok, success. I can confirm this works just exactly as you would expect. The older port revision, in the local portfile repository, supersedes the newer revision in the up-to-date repository. The older qt4-mac port is not flagged for updating after a selfupdate, and appears pinned at that revision, as hoped. The old source file locations are not always correct, so there's one hiccup to ponder. Just had to download it manually. Will probably have to store those somewhere. And there may be some ports that have no older revision that works on - say - Tiger, so they should just be made to disappear somehow (or at least flag as not installable). I can see how that might be done. So this somewhat odd and perhaps not-that-useful-to-anyone-but-me project can be done without any significant macports changes. -- Ticket URL: <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/51799#comment:5> MacPorts <https://www.macports.org/> Ports system for OS X