The Boost version in MacPorts was still 1.59.0—a year old now. When I wrote about Boost.Coroutine2, I found I had to install the latest Boost version 1.61.0. So I had two sets of Boost libraries on my hard drive, which made things . . . er . . . a little bit complicated. After I built Microsoft’s cpprestsdk last night—I managed to make it find and use the MacPorts Boost libraries—I feel more urged to change the situation. So this morning I subscribed to the MacPorts mailing list and posted the question about the outdated version problem. With the help from Mr Michael Dickens and Google, I have a working port of Boost 1.61.0 now. This article will document the procedure how it works.
The first thing one needs to do is check out the port files from the MacPorts Subversion repository. In my case, The boost files are under devel/boost. So I checked out only the boost directory into ~/Programming/MacPorts/devel.
One then needs to tell MacPorts to look for ports in that directory. There are two steps involved:
- Add the URL of the local ports directory (e.g. ‘
file:///Users/yongwei/Programming/MacPorts’ in my case) to/opt/local/etc/macports/sources.conf, above the default rsync URL. - Run the
portindexcommand under that directory. It needs to be rerun every time aPortfileis changed.
Now MacPorts should find ports first in my local ports directory and then the system default. And I could begin patching the files.
It turned out that people tried to update boost half a year ago for Boost 1.60, but they found there were failing ports and the ABI was incompatible with 1.59. The patch was still good to me, as I had now a good example. I simply applied the patch, ran portindex again, and went ahead to port upgrade boost.
The procedure turned out quite smooth, though mkvtoolnix, the only installed port that depended on boost on my laptop, failed to run after the upgrade. I had to port uninstall it and then port install it again (rebuilding it).
After I had some confidence, I began to change the port files. I changed first Portfile, which contained the version information and file checksums. Updating them was trivial. When I could see the new version 1.61.0 from port info boost, I kicked off the build with port upgrade boost again.
Then came the more painful process of fixing the patch files under devel/boost/files (the ‘patch’ I mentioned a moment ago actually contained patches for these patch files). Most of these MacPorts-specific patch files could be applied without any problems, but one of them failed. It was actually due to trivial code changes in Boost, but I still had to check all the rejections, manually apply the changes, and generate a new patch file. After that, everything went on smoothly.
Against all my hopes, I found that I had to rebuild mkvtoolnix yet again. So the ABI instability is really an issue, and I understand now why boost was stuck at the old version for such a long time. However, I consider my task completed, when I uploaded the updated patch to the MacPorts ticket. At least I have the new working port of boost for myself now. And you can have it too.
Yongwei’s Blog 