Shell script to uninstall ports with dependents

Before we begin, I seem to be getting a lot of people visiting this post when searching for “uninstall macports”. Read 2.5 Uninstall from the MacPorts Guide you want to uninstall MacPorts itself.

EDIT: steve k wrote in and opened my eyes to:

sudo port uninstall --follow-dependents portname

So use that instead, and read on only if you like bash.

(I have another script that does the inverse—traverses up the dependency chain removing ‘leaf’ nodes—that is, ports with no further dependencies. Maybe I’ll make a new post on that one—after making sure it’s also not already available as some hidden option. :p )

Determining the type parameter of a generic base class

The following code is provided for educational/illustrative purposes only.

This is probably just a clever hack. This is not kosher. To all students of the Java language, please do not start using this in your day-to-day code. Let me be the first to admit that I haven’t used this extensively and I wouldn’t recommend using it for production.

Disclaimers aside, I won’t give any more background into Java generics. For those in need of an introduction, Angelika Langer’s Java Generics FAQ explains a lot of things with more clarity and depth than I ever could.

The basic problem is, given a generic class, we would like to determine the type parameter to that class at run-time..

I’ve found myself needing to do this more than once. The simplest example I can contrive is one when we want the Base class to perform run-time type-checking of some input parameter.