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How to run MacPorts from the Subversion trunk

• Audience: Anyone who wants to test the latest features or not wait for an official release
• Requires: Subversion (easy with 10.5, tricky with 10.4 since that creates a circular dependency)

Introduction

There are times when some may want to run MacPorts from a version newer than the current stable release. Maybe there's a new feature that you'd like to use, or it fixes an issue you've encountered, or you just like to be on the cutting edge. This explains how to run completely from trunk, using only Subversion to keep MacPorts up to date.

Installation

See the Guide section on ​installing from subversion

Keeping Up to Date

Subversion update

MacPorts has two commands used to keep itself current: sync, used to update the ports tree, and selfupdate, to update the MacPorts base code. When compiling MacPorts yourself instead of using a released MacPorts package, you can continue to use sync to update the ports tree, or you can update the working copy manually like this:

svn update /opt/mports/trunk

You will not find selfupdate useful anymore because it will always see that you have a version newer than the latest released version of MacPorts, and will not update your base code. Instead you should svn update as above and then repeat the steps listed in step 2 above.

Using MacPorts

At this point, most things should work like they do for anyone else; you will encounter some newer functionality that hasn't found its way to a release yet, and occasionally a bug. If so, be sure to ​report the bug when it happens.

Typical Problems

The tcl command cd has been removed in trunk.

When you try to install a port which still uses it you get an error message which says:

Error: Target org.macports.destroot returned: invalid command name "cd"
Warning: the following items did not execute (for [PORTNAME]): org.macports.activate org.macports.destroot org.macports.install
Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.

It was never really intended to be used in portfiles, and it got removed because the side-effects of using it can be confusing. See #12914 for more details and Ryan Schmidt's explanation on the dev list ​in this mail. If you encounter this problem with a port, please file a bug against this port which still uses cd.

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