Richard L. Hamilton wrote: >> On Aug 4, 2019, at 23:53, Dave Allured - NOAA Affiliate via macports-users >> <macports-users at lists.macports.org> wrote: >> >> So will it be sufficient to simply run "port list all" on the current stable >> MacPorts package, as a frequent automatic process? Capture the text result >> and put it in a public downloadable location. > > Periodic, but perhaps not that frequent; for some reason, that command could > take 25 minutes to run; If you're going to use 'port list' to get a list of all ports, run it without any further arguments. The 'all' expands to almost 22k individual port names, which are then searched for one at a time.
Originally, listing all ports was all the list action could do. The ability to specify ports to list was added later, at the same time as pseudo-portname selector support, no doubt to allow narrowing down a list of ports that was getting quite large. These days, there's very little reason to use the list action over info, search or echo (depending on what you're doing). For example, printing the names and versions of all ports can be done quite quickly with the info action: port info --index --line --name --version all - Josh
