Re: Updating both Perl and Perl Modules from a binary repository

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 07:51:41PM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 03:33:41PM +0200, Edgar Fu? wrote:
>  > > What does "pkg_add -u perl p5-Foo p5-Bar" say?
>  >
>  > I don't remember exactly, but in essence "this doesn't work".
>  >
>  > I think, it was that it couldn't install perl-5.14 because p5-*
>  > depended on perl<5.14. And it couldn't update p5-Foo because that
>  > would imply updating perl from 5.12 to 5.14, whereas p5-Bar
>  > depended on perl<5.14.
>  >
>  > My impression was that pkg_add failed to realise that if if would
>  > do *all* the updates at once, the result would be consistent, but
>  > bailed out because there was no path of *gradually* performing the
>  > updates that would, in each step, keep the dependencies fulfilled.
> 
> That would be a bug.

I would disagree. The core issue here is that you can't do this update
with "local" changes. To keep the set of installed packages consistent,
you have to remove all Perl packages, update Perl and re-install them.
This case (having to deinstall something else first) is exactly what IMO
should *not* be the task of pkg_add, but a higher level tool. The
existing logic to recursively update dependencies is already borderline,
but forcing logic for even more complicated cases is not useful.

Joerg