Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2011 12:40:56 -0700 From: Stanislav Sedov <stas@FreeBSD.org> To: Michel Talon <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> Cc: ports@freebsd.org, Doug Barton <dougb@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Re: suggestion for pkgdb from ports-mgmt/portupgrade: add more explanation Message-ID: <20110907124056.371e8e4d.stas@FreeBSD.org> In-Reply-To: <20110902093914.GA92386@lpthe.jussieu.fr> References: <20110902093914.GA92386@lpthe.jussieu.fr>
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On Fri, 2 Sep 2011 11:39:14 +0200 Michel Talon <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> mentioned: > > Your answer is very interesting and allows me to go further in the > reasoning. Indeed the UPDATING file is here to solve edge cases. My > point is that there shouldn't be any edge cases, if there are some it is > because something somewhere has been ill designed, which is not so > suprising since the system has been conceived by Jordan Hubbard when the > number and complexity of ports was much smaller. I certainly don't have > any precise idea of the things which should be changed so that edge > cases disappear, only *very experienced* people having observed a lot > of failure cases could give correct advices. It is not impossible to > design a system which works automatically without having any recourse to > manual intervention, after all, as much as it may displease some people > here, it is a fact that Debian works this way (and Debian-like systems > like Ubuntu). Having a file which documents manual intervention is a > perpetual tentation to do the things the sloppy way, which in fact > frequently occurs in FreeBSD. As long as such a behavior continues, the > authors of portupgrade, portmaster etc. are building on sand. > I've actually been pondering around the idea of having a special version of UPDATING for portmaster/portupgrade so they can do things automatically without user intervention. For most of the rough cases we just ask the user to give specific instructions to portmaster/portupgrade and all of this can be performed in a fully automatic way. -- Stanislav Sedov ST4096-RIPE () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments
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