From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Dec 28 01:57:57 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 15792106564A for ; Tue, 28 Dec 2010 01:57:57 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from dougb@FreeBSD.org) Received: from mail2.fluidhosting.com (mx23.fluidhosting.com [204.14.89.6]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B605C8FC16 for ; Tue, 28 Dec 2010 01:57:56 +0000 (UTC) Received: (qmail 10713 invoked by uid 399); 28 Dec 2010 01:57:55 -0000 Received: from localhost (HELO doug-optiplex.ka9q.net) (dougb@dougbarton.us@127.0.0.1) by localhost with ESMTPAM; 28 Dec 2010 01:57:55 -0000 X-Originating-IP: 127.0.0.1 X-Sender: dougb@dougbarton.us Message-ID: <4D194421.9080304@FreeBSD.org> Date: Mon, 27 Dec 2010 17:57:53 -0800 From: Doug Barton Organization: http://SupersetSolutions.com/ User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD amd64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101210 Thunderbird/3.1.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: David Demelier References: <4D15D275.6000308@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <4D15D275.6000308@gmail.com> X-Enigmail-Version: 1.1.2 OpenPGP: id=1A1ABC84 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: portmaster: print /usr/ports/UPDATING on update X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 01:57:57 -0000 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 On 12/25/2010 03:16, David Demelier wrote: | Hi, | | A lot of people always forget to read UPDATING (that's normal we'll are | humans). | | Each entry in UPDATING is like "AFFECTS: users of net-mgmt/flowd" so if | an update of net-mgmt/flowd is available and a *recent* entry in | UPDATING talks about then print the message. | | This can prevent a lot of breakage and useless noise on lists. What do | you think ? I've caught up on this thread now, kicked it around with the cool cats in #bsdports@efnet, and here is my opinion, to the extent I have anything to say about it. :) The Real AnswerTM is that we need a tool with striking similarities to portaudit. The basic idea would be that UPDATING entries would be done in xml, and then the user can either run portupdating (or whatever the name ends up being, that's a really bad name but I suck at naming tools) either by default for their whole system, or vs. a specific port. I would strongly recommend that the behavior, command line options, etc. be consistent with portaudit. Download it and check the man page if there are any questions. :) This is not really as hard as it sounds, as the entries for UPDATING would not have to be very complex xml-wise, and there is already existing infrastructure that we can leverage to make things easy for the committers. Also having this information in XML format will make it easier for other programmatic solutions down the road. ~From the user side, we're not really losing anything by not having "human readable" output readily available, since 99% of users will just want to be able to know what entries are relevant to their installation anyway. Of course one useful option for the portupdating script would be "print all of the entries since X date" so that if someone had a purpose for reading the plain text it could be dumped to a file, parsed, or what have you. Meanwhile, all of the ports management tools could benefit from having _a_ common tool to do this, similar to how we've all benefited from portaudit. But since that's not likely to happen tomorrow, what I do anticipate adding to portmaster is a "thingy" to stat the update time on $PORTSDIR/UPDATING and then notify you if you have not viewed the file since the last time it was updated. The code to compare/store timestamps I already have, but this also entails adding an option to turn off that behavior, etc. etc. I'm currently debating whether to try to get this into the version of portmaster I release soon'ish, or wait till after the upcoming base releases. The other thing this entails is portmaster actually storing information of its own completely aside from /var/db/{pkg|ports}. I'm really sort of nauseous about that whole idea since it's a slippery slope that I don't want to travel down. But I'm not seeing any other way to accomplish the task of "make sure that the user knows that they should read UPDATING" without doing something very much like this. Of course, if someone else has a better idea, I'm all ears. :) What I do _not_ want to do is write an "UPDATING text file parser" myself. Not only do I think that's a bad idea generally, it's not a project that I am at all interested in, and I don't see it as something that should be part of portmaster to start with. I could be talked into the UPDATING.xml project if someone were to come up with funding for it, but (just being frank and honest) it's too big a project for me to tackle on a volunteer basis atm. | Merry Christmas and happy holidays ! Same to you. :) Doug - -- Nothin' ever doesn't change, but nothin' changes much. -- OK Go Breadth of IT experience, and depth of knowledge in the DNS. Yours for the right price. :) http://SupersetSolutions.com/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.16 (FreeBSD) iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJNGUQhAAoJEFzGhvEaGryEGDoIALiyBkd2PlfEnI/QpfkXXsg5 wGSMjkNoIAh3VJdWIIe48fLlI4V/Wb+958+Jss2BsHf7GyCY5EjBz5/dCYeGTyIG fhHJk0bqxkPtWAawhzn9v1Hrk/WFWUu0Ccr2jqQ847tyoL+iWBuqR+BaT0H1jDQF XgbP7YTYQ2CpYYcwNo4XiNNtrlAcbq8Wa/RCBw80YK/lMeUpMtgumbn94DdW+P0r WxHgZG/JuDmaLp33+D08j+chufD6kbjjPyBI+HDChW2Z9xNweSvxrUP0QVW1q1nQ wgqGgDrds8wXM3qiP/BF7owaV0+VaZHlwx3P4wlUib+oPOusMaum/z21TuzfJSQ= =7+C9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----