Shibboleth Developers

["Scott Cantor" <>]

Just a few notes about what I encountered when I tried to do a routine "port
upgrade installed" to see how it would behave. I wasn't upgrading the SP,
but I was trying to see what it would prevent me from doing outside of that,
since I know what the dependencies are.

The outcome: macports is not a system you can depend on in the same way you
depend on rpm or deb packaging. Those systems handle dependencies in a real
world sense. This one doesn't, because it only tracks port dependencies and
not file-level constraints that would detect library version mismatches.

I think it *can* do so, because it has support for file dependencies, but
they tell port authors not to use them unless the dependent file can't be
found in a port, which is not the case here. I could fix my ports, but that
wouldn't fix the others. But clearly their advice is nonsense; you have to
use non-port dependencies if you want a sane system.

So it's pretty simple...if you upgrade a port, you can easily break a port
that depends on it if the library version changes. In this case, you have to
know the details and manually upgrade packages only once you know it's safe,
or reinstall everything on top.

Kind of sucks, IMHO.

-- Scott