Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 17:12:47 -0500 From: Charles Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Ability for maintainers to update own ports Message-ID: <2E850FE8-1494-11D8-BD31-003065ABFD92@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <3FB13AA5.7090209@fillmore-labs.com> References: <1068458390.38101.19.camel@dirk.no.domain> <20031110152000.622db381.lehmann@ans-netz.de> <1068471598.38101.77.camel@dirk.no.domain> <20031110163623.GC93583@procyon.firepipe.net> <1068495958.690.72.camel@leguin> <53EC784E-13C5-11D8-AD24-003065ABFD92@mac.com> <3FB00E53.8060603@fillmore-labs.com> <20031111021929.GA17050@xor.obsecurity.org> <73E9F604-1472-11D8-BD31-003065ABFD92@mac.com> <20031111183540.GA26599@xor.obsecurity.org> <3FB13AA5.7090209@fillmore-labs.com>
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On Nov 11, 2003, at 2:38 PM, Oliver Eikemeier wrote:
> Kris Kennaway wrote:
>> More broadly speaking, there doesn't seem to be significant interest
>> from the community to provide support for old releases. If there was,
>> it's something that could be provided by a group of interested members
>> of this list.
>
> sysutils/pkg_install is a[n] attempt to supports older releases. In a
> production environment it is not always possible to upgrade the base
> system at will. I'll try my best not to break backwards compatibility
> without a good reason.
Good for you, Oliver. I don't think you're the only person with that
sentiment; a significant number of ports reference OSVERSION in order
to behave correctly on older versions of the OS:
% find /usr/ports -name Makefile -exec grep -l OSVERSION {} \; | wc -l
585
>> There's no way that we can reasonably guarantee that tagged ports will
>> work together (e.g. what happens when a dependency changes?), so
>> tagging has minimal benefit.
I agree that there are no guarantees: either a particular version of a
port compiles (*) under a particular OS release, or it doesn't: this is
deterministic and testable via a mechanism like the bento cluster.
[ *: ...and by implication runs, although support for "make test" or
"make check" within the ports system would be useful. ]
--
With regard to dependency changes, if I've done the following right:
% awk -F\| '{if (length($8) == 0) print $1}' /usr/ports/INDEX | wc -l
2853
...approximately one third of the ports have no runtime dependencies on
other ports. These ports might still fail due to dependencies upon OS
capabilities, but if an older version worked, the maintainer or the
author can add to the number of ports using OSVERSION to implement
backwards compatibility.
>> We already provide this level of minimal
>> support for people who want to try to mix and match old ports, namely
>> people can use cvs to manage their ports tree and update ports to
>> whichever CVS revision they like.
If someone could do a "cvs checkout -r RELENG_4_5" against the ports
CVS repo, and update to the latest version of each port which is known
to build on their version of the OS, that user would obtain
significantly more benefit than being told that they need to upgrade
their OS in order to use newer port versions.
Apache-1.3.29, Python-2.3.2, and a lot of other useful software will
build and install on versions of FreeBSD prior to 4.7 without using
ports. The intent of the ports system is to help users run software on
their machine, not to require users to upgrade to the latest version of
the OS in order to update such ports.
--
-Chuck
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