Note that I’ve set the maintainer for both Puppet and Facter in MacPorts to ‘openmaintainer’. This means that I accept patches from anyone, and it’s really quite trivial to update either of them, as is the case with the vast majority of Portfiles.

The process goes something like:

$ sudo port selfupdate (to get the newest versions)
$ mkdir /tmp/facter
$ cd /tmp/facter
$ cp /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/sysutils/facter/Portfile .
$ cp Portfile Portfile.orig
(edit the port file to change version from 1.5.6 to 1.5.7)
$ port -v checksum (this will print out the expected and obtained checksums. Use this info to update the ‘checksums’ component of the Portfile)
$ port -v checksum (this should return happily now)
$ sudo port -v install (verify that the port is installed correctly)
$ diff -u Portfile Portfile.orig > Portfile-facter.diff (submit an update ticket on the MacPorts Trac site with the diff attached)