From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Sep 7 19:41:40 2011 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ports@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5CE10106564A; Wed, 7 Sep 2011 19:41:40 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from stas@FreeBSD.org) Received: from mx0.deglitch.com (cl-414.sto-01.se.sixxs.net [IPv6:2001:16d8:ff00:19d::2]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 062668FC13; Wed, 7 Sep 2011 19:41:40 +0000 (UTC) Received: from orion.SpringDaemons.com (207.47.0.2.static.nextweb.net [207.47.0.2]) by mx0.deglitch.com (Postfix) with ESMTPA id CE39C8FC2E; Wed, 7 Sep 2011 23:41:38 +0400 (MSD) Received: from orion (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by orion.SpringDaemons.com (Postfix) with SMTP id D502F5C36; Wed, 7 Sep 2011 12:40:56 -0700 (PDT) Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2011 12:40:56 -0700 From: Stanislav Sedov To: Michel Talon Message-Id: <20110907124056.371e8e4d.stas@FreeBSD.org> In-Reply-To: <20110902093914.GA92386@lpthe.jussieu.fr> References: <20110902093914.GA92386@lpthe.jussieu.fr> Organization: The FreeBSD Project X-Mailer: carrier-pigeon Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: ports@freebsd.org, Doug Barton Subject: Re: suggestion for pkgdb from ports-mgmt/portupgrade: add more explanation X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 07 Sep 2011 19:41:40 -0000 On Fri, 2 Sep 2011 11:39:14 +0200 Michel Talon 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