On 23.10.25 22:34, Ryan Carsten Schmidt wrote:
> On Oct 23, 2025, at 15:27, joerg van den hoff wrote:
>>
>> I seem to have an issue with groff 1.23.0 partly not correctly justifying my own man macro
formatted documents. but at some point in the recent past I seemingly "cleaned up" and lost access
to previously installed versions in macports so I no longer simply can activate an older version.
question:
>>
>> most frictionless way to get 1.22.4 installed in my macports tree again (I can either remove
1.23.0 or deactivate it, no matter) and to lock that installation for the time being (so that it is
not accidentally updated in the next port upgrade outdated run)?
>
> https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/InstallingOlderPort
>
> ah thanks for the link!
I've tried to follow that prescription: it seems in may case (going back to last checkin before
groff.1.23.0) I thus need to do
git clone --single-branch https://github.com/macports/macports-ports.git
$ cd macports-ports
git checkout b4da402b979728e1b4cafab278f0c38a2a8ee3d3
(which I did from some not-special subfolder (freely reachable for macports user) in my home dir.
this leads to
"You are in 'detached HEAD' state."
I am definitely not a git user but I know that this usually is bad. question: I guess for just
working with that checkout it is innocuous?
proceeding I did
cd sysutils/groff
sudo port install
which throws this error:
Error: Failed to open statefile for groff: Could not open file:
/Users/{myusername}/software/macports-ports/sysutils/groff/Portfile
Error: Follow https://guide.macports.org/#project.tickets if you believe there
is a bug.
Error: Processing of port groff failed
what am I missing/doing wrong?
