Macports folders

This is my investigation of the folders used by macports. There is a man page ‘porthier’ that shows the port files hierarchy.

Under the location /opt/local/var/macports/registry/portfiles I found a hierarchy of files for every port installed.

This is quite interesting. The Portfile for the sphinx port installed on this laptop has interesting information that was possibly displayed when I was installing it, but I had not payed attention to.

It is the ‘notes’ section of the portfile. It has dollar substitutions too.

To make the Python ${python.branch} version of Sphinx the one that is run when you execute the commands without a version suffix, e.g. ‘sphinx-build’, run:

port select –set ${select.group} [file tail ${select.file}]

And the select.group and select.file entries are defined somewhere else in the Portfile.

select.group sphinx select.file ${filespath}/py${python.version}-sphinx

Now, where is the docutils and sphinx documentation?

The ports documentation is in a useful man page that shows examples of the commands to select the default python and sphinx:

port select --list python
port select --set python python37
sudo port select --set python python37
port select --list python
port select --summary
sudo port select --set sphinx py37-sphinx