Re: pkgsrc-stable branch stories?

[Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost>]

On my personal machines, I tend to use pkgsrc-current.  On machines in
my research group, I've been recommending pkgsrc-stable.

Getting machines updated quarterly is seeming too hard.  So it might
make sense to have 2 stable branches a year instead of 1.  Or, it
would be good to address the real underlying problem - being able to
do fully automatic upgrades via binary packages over the net.  Right
now various people have their own methods, but something that's an
enhancement of pkg_chk and pkgdep that will determine everything
that's covered by 'pkg_chk -r', fetch all the new ones to local
storage, and then do a 'pkg_add -u' tree walk.  This utility should be
able to update to a new branch.

Perhaps I'm being thick and this is doable, but in my view the lack of
this being robust, documented and well understood is the biggest
usability problem in pkgsrc today.  I hope to be able to spend some
time fixing this, but thought I would share my thoughts.

Given a zero-grief upgrade mechanism, moving branches quarterly would
be easy.


-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost>