Hey, a registry of sorts for upgrade criteria, there's an idea.

Are we even considering pkg-izing the system, or are we too early in
the game for that?

[Yes, they're two different questions, however, they are linked.]

Because I am among the ignoscenti who don't always remember what needs
to be redone.

I have found, though, that Hubert Feyrer posted a WONDERFULLY complete
task list for a major upgrade through compilation -- complete enough
to help me through a much lesser upgrade (Thanks!).

Is there any reason we couldn't have a Makefile-dev file sitting
around for the frequent updaters with dependencies in order of needing
upgrades?  I wrote a small sh script that went through, item by item,
comparing the source dates to the binary dates to see what had had
anything added.  It's simplistic, but as a rudimentary heuristic,
it actually works rather well.

To date, since December, I have rebuilt my kernel (several times), sh,
make, lex, yacc, the entire compiler suite, libkvm, top and ps and
that's it -- everything else just kind of works, which is nice.

Ted Lemon sez:
/*
 * The right solution to this problem, which I am merely proposing here
 * and not suggesting you implement, is that the top-level makefile
 * should maintain a registry in /var/pkg or somewhere like that of what
 * version of utilities like this is installed.  When you do a make
 * build, it should check a list of prerequisites, and rebuild and
 * reinstall anything that's out of date.  When somebody makes a change
 * that creates a prerequisite for future builds, that should be encoded
 * in the Makefile.  When somebody stumbles over a change like this that
 * the changer forgot to encode, he or she should encode it in the same
 * way.  This will add a small amount of time to your m68020 build, but
 * it shouldn't be significant, and it will also enable infrequent
 * updaters to win without major anguish when they update.
 * 
 * 			       _MelloN_
 */





				--*greywolf;
--
Solaris 2.0 -- "What a totally amazing excellent discovery.  NOT!"