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Date:      Thu, 27 Jan 2000 21:41:36 -0500 (EST)
From:      Brett Taylor <brett@peloton.runet.edu>
To:        R Joseph Wright <rjoseph@nwlink.com>
Cc:        George Cox <gjvc@extremis.demon.co.uk>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: What are the differences?
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.10.10001272122141.1130-100000@peloton.runet.edu>
In-Reply-To: <3890F572.17BF6577@nwlink.com>

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Hi,

On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, R Joseph Wright wrote:

> Kernel panics may be caused by bad hardware, but most of the error
> codes had to do with dependency problems; the ports are suppposed to
> handle this, aren't they?

Yes and for the majority of people they work fine.  I do recall you were
having problems w/ the metaports and I never heard (or don't remember
reading) whether they were ever resolved.

> I still insist that FreeBSD needs a better packaging system for
> installing and upgrading with binaries.

Insisting is great - helping is better.  That said there is a new
sysinstall/pkg system in the works.  I believe it's supposed to go out the
door w/ 4.0, at least that's what sticks in my head.

> I have had a lot of problems trying to build metaports for kde and
> gnome that are definitely not hardware related.  I'd type in "make" in
> the gnome metaport, for example, and there would be no response, only
> a new command prompt.

Did you have a previous work directory there (this is my guess for what
the problem was - your description of the symptom sounds exactly like what
you would get if this was true)? If you had a work directory and if there
is a .build_done cookie in it then it won't build because it thinks the
software has already been built. Make clean is your friend here.  For a
metaport, make distclean may be even better.

> This was using a freshly updated ports tree.  Also, you can't update
> software with the ports, you can only install a new program, and it
> won't uninstall the old one for you.  This is *my* experience with the
> ports, if it works for you, wonderful.

There are times you don't want to install the old one (tk and friends
were/are one of these).  There are certainly times you do however.  
Knowing what to do and when to do it is tricky.  Example - say you upgrade
xv and with it comes a new version of jpeg.  Should the packaging system
then dump the old jpeg and screw up any other programs that also depend on
the old jpeg libs or install all new packages for everything else (say
gimp, Window Maker etc)?

I'd much rather have manual control and KNOW what's going to be changed
and how it affects the other software on my machine than hope the
packaging software does the right thing or find that it tried to upgrade
20 different things because one library changed for the one thing I tried
to upgrade. I've heard complaints about this same problem from users of
RPMs and Debian's pkg utility.

Brett
*****************************************************
Dr. Brett Taylor         brett@peloton.runet.edu    *
Dept of Chem and Physics			    *
Curie 39A	(540) 831-6147                      *
Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics		    *
Walker 234	(540) 831-5410			    *
*****************************************************



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