Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:38:14 -0700
From:      Steve Franks <bahamasfranks@gmail.com>
To:        Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, Leinier Cruz Salfran <salfrancl.listas@gmail.com>
Subject:   Re: there is a way to avoid strict libraries linking?
Message-ID:  <g2x539c60b91004221538nc58baf36m60e2eb71a395a7f5@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20100414174853.GC43908@dan.emsphone.com>
References:  <n2ya2585ef1004140923s2acb8b2ctf7c9b449cb66f208@mail.gmail.com> <20100414174853.GC43908@dan.emsphone.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> It's much safer to just leave the libraries alone. =A0Just because you
> upgraded libpng doesn't mean that your old gtk binary will stop working
> (assuming you are using "portupgrade" or "portmaster -w" which preserves =
old

<About to get flamed, I know>  Untrue.  Portupgrade deletes the old
version of the port by default.  The PNG upgrade was a major PITA,
because I installed one new port that thought it had to have it.  I'm
sure 98% of the ports I then had to upgrade would have still worked
just fine even if rebuilt against the old libpng.

I think the complaint here is that the port dependencies system
frequently gives the impression/enforces the rule that new ports will
depend on whatever the most current version of everything is in the
ports tree at the time they were built, forcing sort of a perpetual
upgrade cycle.  IMHO this is probably due to naive port maintainers
(such as myself) incorrectly pointing a port at libpng.5 instead of
any libpng, or libpng >=3D 5.  Once the ports tree is 'poisoned' in this
fashion, there's really no going back.  I'd sure vote for an audit of
this behavior as a summer of code project.

Long story short, anything that sounds fundamental gets bumped (png,
jpeg, tcl, python, gtk, etc, etc), I just sit back and get ready to
spend two or three days retrying portupgrade -akOf -mBATCH=3Dyes until
everything sticks.  If you've got OO or KDE4 installed, you might just
want to forget it and pkg_delete -f *, then start over.

I'm sticking by bsd though.  You don't even have the opportunity to
run an automated tool to clean & build everything from source
automatically on linux.  I'm sure rpm & apt dependencies are even
nastier.

Steve



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?g2x539c60b91004221538nc58baf36m60e2eb71a395a7f5>