On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 10:27:55AM -0400, Sean Davis wrote:
> Needing another machine just for package builds is silly. No other *NIX
> OS requires that. That's just as silly as requiring a full NetBSD release
> to build one package (ala pkg_comp). If FreeBSD can do this in a sane
> manner, with portupgrade (however it works)... so can pkgsrc. If NetBSD
> isn't going to provide up to date binary packages for every branch (which
> would require quite a lot of build hardware)... then NetBSD needs to
> provide a means for updating a package without removing everything first,
> for people who want to keep their system usable until the package is
> ready to install.

With most Linux distributions, you also need a separate machine to get
packages: their package repositories.  

And the FreeBSD way, portupgrade, is theoretically broken.  It replaces
dependencies without rebuilding some/all of the dependant packages.  In
practice, this may work out 90% of the time.  And FreeBSD has manpower to
fix the other 10%.  How do they do this?  If e.g. libpng is updated to a
version _known to cause binary incompatibilities_ (needs manpower to check
this!!), they bump the version of all packages depending on it.  So a
portupgrade -r will upgrade them too.  You (with your reasoning) wouldn't
mind: you say, oh, KDE has a bumped package version, ok to upgrade it too,
whereas the KDE package itself really didn't change.  We (pkgsrc people),
don't bump the version of any depending packages, we just assume you to
rebuild them anyway, to play safe.  

GH

-- 
:wq