make dist requires DISTVER to be specified

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

If you run make dist without arguments, it says:

Usage: make dist DISTVER=2.3.4
make: *** [dist] Error 1

Why must the version be specified? Isn't this a possible source of user error? Couldn't it be read from macports-base/config/macports_version​ instead?

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

You can run this command from any branch as it is not tied to the branch you have checked out. As we have never merged changes to the release process to release branches, I would expect to always run this command from master.

Maybe this should not be a target in this Makefile and it should be moved to a standalone script instead, for example in portmgr/ next to ReleaseProcess.md, or even to another repository.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Replying to raimue:

You can run this command from any branch as it is not tied to the branch you have checked out. As we have never merged changes to the release process to release branches, I would expect to always run this command from master.

Oh I see. It doesn't make a distfile from the code that's checked out; it makes it from the specified tag. That's not what I expected but I can see why we want that to ensure that the distfile exactly matches the contents of the tag.

Maybe this should not be a target in this Makefile and it should be moved to a standalone script instead, for example in portmgr/ next to ReleaseProcess.md, or even to another repository.

I'm not sure. I'm in the process of implementing make pkg (#56055) and I was thinking about tying it in with make dist somehow. But now that I understand how make dist works, maybe I can't do that.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

I think needing to checkout a second repository in order to build base would be inconvenient. But a separate Makefile in the macports-base repository could be reasonable. I'll try that.