On Thu, 23 Jun 2005 07:24:06 -0400
"D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <darcy@NetBSD.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 23 Jun 2005 06:08:53 -0400
> Sean Davis <dive-nb@endersgame.net> wrote:
> > make update is terribly broken. It is not correct, nor can I see how
> > it was ever thought to be correct, to wipe out every package with a
> > pkg_delete -r before it's even known if they'll build (commonly
> > leaving one with half the packages they had, if they do it on
> > something like mplayer, have KDE installed, and KDE doesn't build...)
> 
> This topic has come up again and again.  I still don't understand what
> the opposition is to keeping the system useable as long as possible. 
> See my message in
> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2003/01/04/0007.html for my
> previous discussion of this topic.  There have also been proposals to

I think this is a good idea.

Furthermore, I have found 'make replace' quite usable in the general
case. As I understand it, this is basically how FreeBSD (portupgrade)
and Gentoo does it. Just walk the dependancy-chain and 'make replace'
everything which needs updating. People tend to find ports/portage
quicker than pkgsrc when it comes to updates, and I guess it is
because of this.

One thing I would like to add to pkgsrc in this case is an extra meta-
data field for each package listing what versions of the other packages
it was compiled against. This makes it possible to 'repair' a system
when for example a 'make replace' on kdelibs3 do not really work out
for some package down the dependancy chain. Then it will be easy to
identify the packages which has been built against an old version of
kdelibs3, and rebuild them against the new version.

Perhaps two modes to 'make update'; quick mode and normal mode. Quick
mode mimics portupgrade and normal mode like in the URL above.


Best regards
	Lars Nordlund