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Date:      Wed, 20 Jun 2001 08:48:27 -0700
From:      Jordan Hubbard <jkh@osd.bsdi.com>
To:        Antoine.Beaupre@ericsson.ca
Cc:        alex@big.endian.de, jhb@FreeBSD.ORG, richy@apple.com, libh@FreeBSD.ORG, will@physics.purdue.edu
Subject:   Re: packagetool.tcl
Message-ID:  <20010620084827V.jkh@osd.bsdi.com>
In-Reply-To: <3B30B1E4.80909@lmc.ericsson.se>
References:  <20010619231951.B4230@zerogravity.kawo2.rwth-aachen.d> <20010619142832K.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> <3B30B1E4.80909@lmc.ericsson.se>

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From: "Antoine Beaupre (LMC)" <Antoine.Beaupre@ericsson.ca>
Subject: Re: packagetool.tcl
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 10:23:32 -0400

> Of course. But we don't want that. What we want is *libh* to be 
> expressive enough to understand plists. :)

Erm, this is a bit like those folks who think that you can improve the
sound quality of really old recordings by somehow applying enough
modern digital sound processing.  If the data you need just isn't
there to begin with, it becomes awfully hard to pull it out of thin
air. :) That's the point I'm trying to make here.  libh contains a lot
more information about a package, such as whether it occludes or
updates another package, and this information goes straight into the
new registration database.  If the old package doesn't provide it, and
they won't since we didn't even make provisions for stuff like that
back then, what you're left with post-installation is still something
that doesn't stand up to the installation of a modern package.  As you
get into this, I'm sure you'll discover even worse "gotchas" than
this.

> I'm not sure I follow you here. We don't want the old package system to 
> be compatible with the new one. But we would probably want the new one 
> to be compatible with the old one, ie. that it could at least 
> *understand* it.

I'm sure it's capable of "understanding" it just fine, it just may not
find the old packages expressive enough for its needs.  Why not wait
until libh is fully fleshed out in any case before tackling the thorny
backwards-compatibility issues?

> This shouldn't be a problem. I tried to implement a hacky perl script to 
> cleanup /var/db/pkg of duplicate packages that parsed +CONTENTS files 
> and I found that in most cases, the lines are quite simple. The 
> "@-directives" are not that common.

That's fine, but it's the uncommon cases I'm talking about here.

- Jordan

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