From owner-freebsd-ports Fri Oct 8 14:22:50 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Received: from guru.phone.net (guru.phone.net [216.240.39.120]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 8C6EF14EA3 for ; Fri, 8 Oct 1999 14:22:48 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@phone.net) Received: (qmail 8731 invoked by uid 100); 8 Oct 1999 21:22:48 -0000 Received: from localhost (sendmail-bs@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 8 Oct 1999 21:22:48 -0000 Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 14:22:48 -0700 (PDT) From: Mike Meyer To: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: install newer version over old one... In-Reply-To: <199910081718.KAA71914@nimitz.ca.sandia.gov> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Fri, 8 Oct 1999, Bruce A. Mah wrote: :->My two cents (which have probably already been expressed very well by :->others on this list) are that: Explicit support for finding two :->versions of "the same" port is a Good Thing (TM). Whoever does this :->also needs to think very carefully about what "newer" means (in :->particular, keeping in mind that "newer" != "better"). There's also :->the idea that a package can change without changing the version number :->of the installed software (e.g. someone adds a patch-xx or tweaks the :->Makefile). Do you really need the ability to find two versions of "the same" port, or do you just need the ability to reliably decide if it is safe to overwrite portA with portB (i.e. - portB is a "newer" version of portA)? If the latter, then port naming conventions will do the trick. I think something like that is going to be required in case, because what we are (well, I am) discussing is automatically rebuilding the installed ports (or re-installing the installed packages) during a system upgrade. This is going to requires rules that programs can use for finding and rebuilding ports. The reason for discussing this is that a package can change without changing the ports files at all. I have more than once done a system upgrade only to have an installed port stop working because the OS interface changed in some way. :->I'm somewhat in favor of encoding some of this data in /var/db/pkg/ :->foo-x.y.z/+SOMEFILE since the package creation process has a lot more of :->this information available than pkg_version does, thus eliminating the :->need for pkg_version (et al) to try to figure these things out. That will certainly be necessary as well.