Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 19:25:13 -0400 (EDT) From: Chuck Robey <chuckr@mat.net> To: John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com> Cc: Jacques Vidrine <n@nectar.com>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: /sys/boot, egcs vs. gcc, -Os Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9904081920150.378-100000@picnic.mat.net> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.990408122458.jdp@polstra.com>
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On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, John Polstra wrote: > Jacques Vidrine wrote: > > > > Maintainers of these ports would appreciate PRs if the dependencies > > are broken. The ports infrastructure has the mechanisms necessary to > > handle these dependencies, but the port maintainer may not catch > > every dependency. > > I am not saying the dependencies are broken. I'm just lamenting the > general problem that it's difficult to upgrade a port that depends on > a lot of things. It's a general structural problem, and I don't know > how to fix it. > > Say you've got a bunch of ports that all depend on the same shared > library -- maybe libjpeg or libXpm. You've had them installed for > a few months, and they all work fine. Now you decide to upgrade > one of them, the "foo" port. Oops, it requires a newer version of > libjpeg. You have to remove the old libjpeg so that the newer one > can be installed without a lot of complaints. Oops, a bunch of other > ports used the old libjpeg. Now you have to upgrade those ports too. > Oops, some of those ports depend on libXpm, and a new version of it is > needed now. Oops, now some other ports that used the old libXpm need > to be upgraded. And on top of that, there are about 5 top tracks of libs, each of these 5 tracks (that have lots depending on them) has lived in both /usr/local and in /usr/X11R6 in recent times, both leave ascii configuration files behind (and in both sets of directories, depending on the age of the older ports). Just to make everything totally confused, because some insane folks want to have multiple versions active concurrently, the name of those config files, which exist in multiple places, have multiple names. Each of the ports of the apps, which need all these libs, have configuration scripts that go looking for all these misnamed and misfiled config scripts, and those configuration scripts alway seem to find the oldest and most out-of-date config script possible. Bleah! > > At this point, you throw up your hands, pkg_delete -f everything, > and reinstall all your ports from scratch. And the next time you're > tempted to upgrade a port, you decide it would be easier to just buy > a new machine. :-) > > John > --- > John Polstra jdp@polstra.com > John D. Polstra & Co., Inc. Seattle, Washington USA > "Self-interest is the aphrodisiac of belief." -- James V. DeLong > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message > ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- Chuck Robey | Interests include any kind of voice or data chuckr@picnic.mat.net | communications topic, C programming, and Unix. 213 Lakeside Drive Apt T-1 | Greenbelt, MD 20770 | I run picnic (FreeBSD-current) (301) 220-2114 | and jaunt (Solaris7). ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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