On Nov 16, 2020, at 17:58, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
>
> Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>>> So I have to force the "gcc-4.2" of xcode... that one works (and, luckily,
>>> libxml2 still compiles with it)
>> My point is that "sudo port upgrade outdated" should work. If it does not,
>> we may have a bug somewhere that we need to fix, and what you're describing
>> above sounds like we haven't declared dependencies correctly somewhere, or
>> maybe we have a circular dependency. Forcibly rebuilding a port is nice to
>> know how to do, I just wanted to emphasize that it is not a task we expect
>> users to need to do on a regular basis.
>>
>
> you are perfectly right! Since I'm am on an old (even is "beloved") OS
> version, I expect some hiccups, but this is harder.
> However, as I tried to explain, the problem is a bit deep - causing all
> MacPorts compiler to break is a pain on systems which have an older
> toolchain. Probably this goes unnoticed on newer macs where the system
> clang/gcc is "new enough".
> Here were are in the situation that if, for some upstream reason, libxml2
> stops compiling with gcc 4.2, the user has no workaround and is stuck in an
> endless dependency.
If such a situation were to arise, then indeed we would want to do something
about it. We do have automated build machines for Mac OS X 10.6 and later so if
such a situation did arise we would probably notice it on the build machines.
As far as I know, we do not have such a situation at present.
