one for the wishlist

[Jörn Clausen <joernc%googlemail.com@localhost>]

Hi!

Maybe this is already doable somehow, maybe this is not worth it...
Probably I get told to do it myself... Anyway:

I'd like to see a feature in pkgsrc that creates an automatic log of
the packages installed, preferably in a human readable format, e.g. a
text file with one line per record. It should contain information

- when a package was installed (name, version, timestamp)
- why it was installed (as dependency of what other package)
- when a package was updated
- when a package was removed

The reason is, that pkg_info, lintpkgsrc and other tools provide a
great overview of the current status of your local pkgsrc
installation, but not about its history. When testing a package and
removing it later, I find it hard to clean up all dependencies that
are no longer used. If it was the last package that got installed,
timestamps help. But  after installing more packages, or doing a few
updates, this information is usually lost. Some kind of log about
which packages were installed together at a certain point in time
would be great. And it would be handy to correlate problems that are
caused by updates. If someone tells you "That's not working since two
weeks" (imagine you have a *really* slow service desk that needs this
long to forward tickets to you), it would be easy to look up what
changes took place two weeks ago.

It would be possible to craft several solutions to this (e.g. storing
the output of pkg_info in regular intervals). But integrating it into
pkgsrc's build and install process and triggering it automatically
would guarantee the correct granularity. If I am not mistaking, with
the switch to DESTDIR, pkg_add could be a reasonable place to
implement this.

-- 
Joern Clausen
http://thebloeg.blogspot.com/
http://www.oe-files.de/oefiles/