Add feature to show changes between port versions

[sewebster@…]

Several times when I have run the port outdated command and seen that there was an update available to one of my installed ports, I have wondered what it is that has changed between the two versions. I don't know of an easy way to get this information, other than browsing the revisions in the source on trac.

It may be possible to create a command line tool that displays this information. I guess it would have to take a portname and two versions as inputs, then look through the revision history to find when the versions changed, and then compile a list of all the change descriptions.

Of course if there were changelogs it could just output that.

[sewebster@…]

I guess an easier way for this to work from the user perspective would be to have a command like port diff portname and just compare the installed version with the available version.

[blb@…]

If you're thinking along the lines of having it display the commit message, note that many of those aren't going to say much beyond "update to version x.y.z" meaning it won't be any more informative than outdated's "1.2.3 < 1.2.4".

[sewebster@…]

Right. I suppose what might be less obvious is changes between revisions, which would be macports-only. But perhaps these are of limited interest to many users.

[anddam (Andrea D'Amore)]

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[nerdling (Jeremy Lavergne)]

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[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Try "port-whatsnew", available now in the contrib section of the repository. See r70612.

[sewebster@…]

Wow, thats fantastic! Thanks.

Possible items for future versions could be:

• support more than one port argument
• support pseudoports
• or, I guess a subset of the previous point, make it easy to spit out the changes to all outdated ports, e.g.

  port echo outdated | cut -f 1 -d" " | xargs -n 1 ./port-whatsnew.sh
  

[macosforge@…]

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[macports@…]

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[macports.org@…]

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[macports.org@…]

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