Marc Espie wrote:
> We rewrote our pkgtools infrastructure. It does handle special stuff
> in packing-lists. It does handle dependencies gracefully, especially
> during package delete. It does handle the creation of new users. It
> does handle the in-place update of one package (and along the way, we
> discovered that it is not quite enough, because files change packages,
> so you have to handle atomic update of small package sets, say
> kdelibs+kdebase, whenever a file changes homes). We also discovered some
> really weird things, like dependency inversions (the cairo stuff in gnome
> means that we got from a-0.0 -> b-0.0   to b-1.0 -> a-1.0, really weird).
> There's no reason you need to run into the same issues we did.
> 
> I agree with Roland Illig that pkgsrc sucks. We have addressed quite a few
> of these concerns. In fact, our current clean-ups involve formal checking
> of file permissions and ownership, then turning on a more paranoid mode
> for pkg_create/pkg_add.

I have recently added basic checking of file permissions, and many more 
consistency checks. When the package tools rewrite has finished, these 
tools will also be much stricter than before. At least I expect them to 
be. :) So we don't live in a vacuum, we just don't advance as quickly as 
it might be possible.

By the way, many of the ideas you wrote in this mail are waiting in my 
head to be implemented. But I don't have enough time to do them all.

Roland