On 4/17/2013 00:34, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
I have been using FreeBSD ports and pkgsrc for years, and don't know about the technique for building from updated FreeBSD ports tree that does a better job with this (of installing new dependencies and installing new dependent packages because they no longer work with new dependencies). Can you share an example? (By the way, FreeBSD ports will allow you to remove a dependency even when a package still depends on it, with a warning but no extra interaction.)
Not quite. If you try to remove a package with pkg that is still needed, you can't unless you specifically force it. If you are in the packages port directory, you can type "make deinstall" and it won't complain because it assumes you are going to rebuild it. This behavior is fine and logical to me.
As for the first question, with pkgsrc I either have to use "rolling replace" which seems to fail more often than not, or I have to individually update each package (babysitting) and some of those package actually shouldn't have required an update. I guess the FreeBSD equivalent is portmaster or portupgrade. It's been a long time since I've used these but I didn't have these issues with those tools.
Anyway this is probably moot if pkgsrc position is that users aren't supposed to build from source without the use of pbulk/distbb.