Port does make no difference between active (completely installed) and not activated but upgraded software

[ballapete (Peter "Pete" Dyballa)]

I recently upgraded on PPC Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5.8, icu with the faulty configure option --disable-rpaths (coming from Tiger, Mac OS X 10.4.11) and new libxml2 was built as an upgrade with that. Some software failed to work afterwards, so I uninstalled new icu and re-activated its old version. Similarly I did with libxml2 but did not uninstall its faulty upgrade (presuming it would have been OK with an OK installation of icu). Later port was satisfied that libxml2 did not need an upgrade and now did upgrade icu with correct settings but forgot to activate the up-to-date version of libxml2. So next software depending on libxml2 it tried to upgrade lead to build errors because the old versions of icu dylibs which old libxml2 was dependent on were gone.

IMO port did not check that the upgraded port was actually activated and in use, it was satisfied with not seeing any dependency in the list of outdated software.

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

The issue description is hard to follow, but if I understand it correctly this is a duplicate of #20683.

[ballapete (Peter "Pete" Dyballa)]

A different description:

port upgrade icu (with faulty Portfile) glib2

xz @5.4.3_0 date='2023-05-18T19:59:44+0200'
lbzip2 @2.5_3 date='2023-05-18T19:50:33+0200'
sqlite3 @3.42.0_0 date='2023-05-18T19:46:56+0200'

These three "additional" packages plus libxml2 were built. Invocation of some command failed, cause was found, recent build stopped and cleaned.

Upgraded version of icu deactivated and uninstalled, previous version of icu re-activated, upgraded version of libxml2 deactivated, previous version of libxml2 re-activated, two software archive files did exist.

Recent version of icu built and installed with proper Portfile.

Upgradeing of outdated ports continued, failure when some port (libxslt?) was built that was depending on libxml2 which has dependencies from icu.

Since previous version of libxml2 was active and using versioned dylibs from previous and uninstalled version of icu, build failed.