Unexpected update time on package screen, it does not show the time the portfile was updated.

[bestlem]

I was looking at the xonsh details page on 22 Jun 2022 at 0900 GMT.

Two things seem odd

1. It shows no Trac tickets when I know there are some albeit closed. If this should just be showing the count of open tickets then please label it as such. Please make the link to trac work even if there a no open tickets as you should look at previous tickets before raising a new one.

2. The package had been updated a few hours before see last trac ticket and you can see some buildbots have the fixed version. But the top line says Updated: 3 days, 22 hours ago which was the previous release.

[arjunsalyan]

1. It shows no Trac tickets when I know there are some albeit closed. If this should just be showing the count of open tickets then please label it as such. Please make the link to trac work even if there a no open tickets as you should look at previous tickets before raising a new one.

Yes, it only shows open tickets as of now.

2. The package had been updated a few hours before see last trac ticket and you can see some buildbots have the fixed version. But the top line says Updated: 3 days, 22 hours ago which was the previous release.

This is expected behaviour. Currently, Updated at gets set only when the version changes. As long as the version remains same, Updated at remains same. We could change the logic to reset on change in Revision as well though.

We could potentially change the title of this issue. Data is NOT inconsistent, in fact the currently coded logic is correctly working. We can, however do improvements to the visuals (for example with tickets) and update the logic to reset Updated at on revision changes.

[bestlem]

The page has now changed to say that Xonsh was updated 3 hours ago because of a new Xonsh version so I can't confirm what I saw.

From my view it was not expected behaviour and thus this issue.
I would suggest that updating to show change in revision as well might for the best as that will correspond to all changes in the port file which is the information you are after if debugging e.g. you can see if the buildbot has run before the change or if you need to run a sudo port selfupdate to get the correct Portfile.

I have changed the title to reflect my view but if you can improve it please do so.

[arjunsalyan]

The purpose of “Updated at” is not to report “all” updates to a portfile. You have commit history for that.

The page wants to report when a particular version was released.

[bestlem]

How do I find from that page when a Portfile chnaged? Which is the importtany piece of information.

If you want to know about a version you need to know what version - and that data is not shown. In fact don't you want to know the date of the upstream change not the Portfile?

xonsh here is a good example not only did we have a macports issue with the release of 0.12.5 5 days ago which cause the update of the version in the Portfile 3 days ago and that failed so the Portfile got updated yesterday to fix that. xonsh are having their own release issues so the released 0.12.6 yesterday and we updated the port the 3 hours ago.

So what date is useful for debugging - I think the time the Portfile updated is the most useful followed by xonsh's update date (which we can't really find) and the release of the failed Portfile is not that useful.

[arjunsalyan]

The ports website is not just intended for port maintainers, but also for users who just want to install a piece of software.

For any user it is important information when the latest version of this port was released. It is correct that we are not storing the historical data about port versions - it is just the latest one from the Portfile.

For port maintainers, you can click on the GitHub button on the Port Details page and view the commit history of the port to see all the changes ever done in a Portfile.

Port maintainers have other means to debug. The website tries to be useful for both - the end-users and port maintainers. End-users might not even know what a Portfile is, and hence each and every change to a Portfile should not be reported as “Update at”. And for developers, we have a quick link to the Portfile on GitHub. That’s how we try to keep the website meaningful for both parties.

[ryandesign]

In fact don't you want to know the date of the upstream change not the Portfile?

MacPorts does not store that information anywhere so it cannot be be displayed on the ports.macports.org web site.