port clean all fails if variant conflict is detected

[gthb (Gunnlaugur Thor Briem)]

In going through wiki:Migration (prompted by the Mavericks upgrade, as you might expect), the sudo port clean all step failed for me when it got to a port named clutter, saying “error evaluating variants” because +x11 conflicts with +quartz.

Commenting out the (single) line of variant flags in /opt/local/etc/macports/variants.conf got me past this. But it seems unnecessarily brittle that the clean operation should fail because of the configured variant flags.

[gthb (Gunnlaugur Thor Briem)]

Of course I should have included that variants line that I commented out as a workaround:

+doc +python27 +bash_completion +no_gnome +quartz

[dbevans (David B. Evans)]

Thanks for the report. Please remember when filing tickets to CC maintainers and include the name of the port in the port field of the submittal form. Also note that the 'base' component tag refers to the port application itself: reports on individual ports should use the 'ports' component tag.

$ port info --maintainer clutter
maintainer: devans@macports.org, openmaintainer@macports.org

[gthb (Gunnlaugur Thor Briem)]

My thinking was that this wasn't specific to the clutter port — that the clean command should not fail because some particular port has some unfortunate variant setup.

[dbevans (David B. Evans)]

Perhaps but I'm thinking that your selection of variants is also part of the problem although there isn't enough information provided to nail it down.

If you were intending to have a +quartz only build environment you should have included also +no_x11 -x11 to your variants. Many ports have +x11 variants (but not +quartz variants) and typically +x11 is the default. Your variant selection can result in a mixture of +x11 and +quartz variants that can be problematic.

In the case of clutter, the port has both +x11 (the default) and +quartz variants and the two are mutually exclusive and so marked in the port (+x11 conflicts +quartz and vice versa). It will install +x11 if you don't provide a +quartz variant but +quartz if you do. Both is not allowed. So nothing unfortunate here.

I'm guessing that you had a +x11 version of clutter installed before you added the +quartz variant in variants.conf and didn't upgrade the port to the new variants. The installed variant conflicted with your declared variant which is what port was reporting.

Problems like this can be resolved by using the command

sudo port upgrade --enforce-variants <target>

with a port (e.g. clutter) or a pseudo port (e.g. installed) as the target.

[dbevans (David B. Evans)]

Clarifying intent of original report

[gthb (Gunnlaugur Thor Briem)]

(I can't edit the description myself: by omitting the prefix in etc/macports/variants.conf, I meant relative to the MacPorts install prefix of course, e.g. /opt/local/etc/macports/variants.conf.)

[dbevans (David B. Evans)]

Cc Me!

[neverpanic (Clemens Lang)]

Duplicate of #40042.