port install fails if $COLUMNS is unset

[yesthatjwz (Jamie Zawinski)]

% port install openssl
--->  Computing dependencies for openssl
--->  Cleaning openssl
--->  Scanning binaries for linking errors
Error: rev-upgrade failed: can't read "env(COLUMNS)": no such variable

Setting $COLUMNS fixes it, but that's dumb.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Which terminal are you using that doesn't set COLUMNS?

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Note that we've been using COLUMNS in MacPorts since 2008 so there must be something unusual about your setup that doesn't like this. If we can pinpoint what it is, maybe we can work around it, but we'll need your help in figuring out what it is.

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

Please give exact instructions how to reproduce this problem. When COLUMNS or LINES is not available in the shell environment, port(1) will query the terminal for its size with the TIOCGWINSZ ioctl. I am unable to get to a situation where all of that failed.

[tom-seddon (Tom Seddon)]

For whatever it's worth, I just got this running through Travis CI.

The Travis CI Macs come with HomeBrew preinstalled, so I imagine most people use that. My project uses avr-gcc, which HomeBrew builds from scratch, so I install MacPorts to get a pre-built copy quickly.

​https://github.com/tom-seddon/beeblink/blob/8ac7e728f7e1d5761fa5bc8b4dd762109cd1315b/.travis.yml should give you an idea of what command lines were involved.

​https://travis-ci.org/tom-seddon/beeblink/builds/422163670 is the build output from the problem build.

--Tom

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

#48968