BUG: activation status of dependencies is not checked before installation

[opendarwin.nospam@…]

assuming i want to install port A that depends on port B. in case that port B is already installed but currently not activated for some reason, "port install portA" does not complain and begins to install port A nonetheless. the installation will most likely fail in the configure, or build phase because it cannot locate port B that it depends on.

this has bitten me several times by now and can be quite confusing, especially when a port is unintentionally inactive due to a prior installation/activation error.

i really would expect that darwinports moans when i try to install a port that has inactive dependencies. imho it should spit out a warning at least.

[jmpp@…]

Milestone Needs developer review deleted

[vinc17@…]

Any news?

[rhwood@…]

This bug has bitten us badly with the replacement of scrollkeeper with rarian. The problem was that for the most part, rarian was automatically installed as a dependency of other ports before scrollkeeper could be removed, so rarian is sitting around inactive on systems where it should be active.

See also #14971

[jmr@…]

Nominating for the upcoming release.

[raimue@…]

Image mode is still optional and users can still choose not to use it in macports.conf. Therefore there should be a distinction whether we are in image mode or not.

[jmr@…]

Replying to raimue@macports.org:

Image mode is still optional and users can still choose not to use it in macports.conf. Therefore there should be a distinction whether we are in image mode or not.

Attaching a new patch that checks that, and also checks for activation in another place I missed before.

[jmr@…]

proposed fix

[jmr@…]

Committed the patch to trunk in r36735. There is a corner case where if you've selected different variants when installing the dependent than the inactive dependency was built with, a new version of the dependency will be built with the new variants (instead of the existing version being activated). I'm not sure if this should be considered a bug or a feature.

[jmr@…]

Closing since 1.6.1 has turned into 1.7.