[ On Saturday, May 18, 2002 at 23:23:02 (+0000), Martin J. Laubach wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Managing lots of installed packages, buildlink and versions
>
>   So should we add those BUILDLINK_DEPENDS? I think those rampant
> "must upgrade" situations are higly annoying...

If you don't want to be forced to upgrade everything in sync then I
would suggest that you not try to follow the bleeding edge of pkgsrc!  :-)

Indeed mucking with BUILDLINK_DEPENDS.* settings without a deep
understanding of all the interrelated issues is risky and even
potentially dangerous.  Shared library integration very much a black art
and purposefully subverting the tested combinations just to save a
little bit of time and effort could result in a wide variety of
unexpected consequences.

On the other hand Frederick Bruckman recently proposed a much saner
alternativve to mucking with BUILDLINK_DEPENDS.* settings under the
subject "Introducing a better way of updating packages (long)".  His
proposal entails just-in-time automatic splitting out of the run-time
dependents from packages being upgraded so that they can be separately
managed while the package they originally came from is deleted and
replaced with a newer version.

Personally I've been experimenting with a return to static-only builds,
which of course also completely eliminates run-time interdependencies on
shared libraries.  My experiments have also revealed that shared
libraries can often be a very expensive way to save on virtual memory.  ;-)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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