Tips and Tricks for committers

This page provides some useful hints how to work with our infrastructure. And they can also make your work a lot easier.

Set svn properties automatically on new Portfiles

In the configuration for your Subversion client, enable automatic property setting and, for all files named Portfile, setting "svn:eol-style" to "native" and "svn:keywords" to "Id". If you are not using Subversion's own svn command-line client, see its documentation. For svn, you can make the appropriate changes by editing ~/.subversion/config as follows:

...

[miscellany]
enable-auto-props = yes

...

[auto-props]
Portfile = svn:eol-style=native;svn:keywords=Id

Apply patches directly from Trac URL

Installation

Add the following functions to your .bashrc in order to apply patches directly from Trac.

function trac-get {
    local url=$1
    local dir=$2

    if [[ -z $dir ]]; then
        dir=.
    fi  

    curl "$url?format=raw" --create-dirs -o $dir/$(basename $1)
}

function trac-patch {
    local cmd=""
    while [[ $1 == -* ]]; do
        if [[ "$1" == "--" ]]; then
            break
        fi

        cmd="$cmd $1"
        shift
    done

    if [[ -z $cmd ]]; then
        cmd="-p0"
    fi  

    trac-get $1
    patch $cmd < $(basename $1)
}

Usage

Use like this:

1. Copy the URL to the patch from the Trac ticket page
2. Switch to the ports directory

   $ cd $(port dir foo)
   

3. Apply the patch

   $ trac-patch http://trac.macports.org/attachment/ticket/.../Portfile.diff
   

You can also add options to trac-patch which will get passed through to the patch tool. This is especially useful when the patch needs another prefix level.

$ trac-patch -p1 http://trac.macports.org/attachment/ticket/.../Portfile.diff

If you don't add any option, -p0 is used as a default. This should be the most common case.

trac-get can also download to another directory. If the directory does not yet exist, it will be created. Just add a second parameter with the name of the directory. If you omit the second parameter, the current directory is used.

$ trac-get http://trac.macports.org/attachment/ticket/.../Portfile new-port

Do Explorative Programming in tclsh with Readline Support

tclsh does not offer readline support by itself, which is quite annoying. When writing portfiles or tinkering with changes to Macports base, I need to experiment in a Tcl shell all the time to tests small things. But for that, command history and Emacs-like navigation within the line are essential. Unfortunately tclsh does not offer this.

Solution: use port rlwrap together with tclsh. When you invoke tclsh via rlwrap you get all the convenience you know from bash.

rlwrap tclsh

Or, put even an alias into ~/.bashrc

alias tclsh='rlwrap tclsh'

and don't think about it ever again.

Syntax Coloring When Editing Portfiles with Text Editors

See [BBEditLanguageModule this page] for setting up BBEdit or TextWrangler to have a MacPorts Language Module