On Fri, 24 Jun 2005, Geert Hendrickx wrote:

> 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.

In fact, pkgsrc does bump the version if needed.

If the dependency has an ABI change and we rebuild the package depending
on it, then it is a new package with different functionality (or features)
in one way or another. We use PKGREVISION to signify that it is a new
package.

We attempt (I hope) to not blindly bump every package depending on
something though.

As for portupgrade, I have used it many times. Sometimes it works and
sometimes it doesn't.

 Jeremy C. Reed

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