Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2011 16:38:57 +0200 From: Michel TALON <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> To: ports@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: suggestion for pkgdb from ports-mgmt/portupgrade: add more explanation Message-ID: <20110901143857.GB56708@lpthe.jussieu.fr>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Julian H. Stacey wrote: > Suggestion: pkgdb is too cryptic even with -v, > it needs more explanation what it is up to & > particularly what decisions it asks from user > ..... This is a point i have studied a long time, notably i have read the ruby code doing that. There are a lot of heuristics doing automatic choices, when they fail they ask the end user. The whole stuff is quite complicated, and asking questions to the user is certainly not the solution, since he has no business knowing the necessary details. In practice he does arbitrary (usually bad) choices and the system degrades. In general one should always be able to make these decisions automatically using the MOVED file, which is what portmaster does (barring some exceptions which occur from time to time and are supposed to be documented in UPDATING - which is an offense to the automaticity of the system). I thing that portupgrade should be modified to remove all those heuristics and use MOVED, but the code is not so obvious to understand, and ruby (as far as i am concerned) doesn't help. Finally the file UPDATING should be forcefully removed from the system, and ports maintainers should get at the same effect through means which don't prevent automatisation (for example upping the revision levels of all appropriate ports, even if they are very numerous). At the end of the day, portupgrade is so awfully slow that i think moving away from ruby could also help in this respect. -- Michel TALON
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20110901143857.GB56708>