From owner-freebsd-ports  Thu Feb 13 06:16:44 1997
Return-Path: <owner-ports>
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id GAA12932
          for ports-outgoing; Thu, 13 Feb 1997 06:16:44 -0800 (PST)
Received: from rtfm.ziplink.net ([199.232.255.52])
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA12923;
          Thu, 13 Feb 1997 06:16:28 -0800 (PST)
Received: (from mi@localhost) by rtfm.ziplink.net (8.8.5/8.7.3) id JAA29203; Thu, 13 Feb 1997 09:17:23 -0500 (EST)
From: Mikhail Teterin <mi@aldan.ziplink.net>
Message-Id: <199702131417.JAA29203@rtfm.ziplink.net>
Subject: Re: ports/2678
To: asami@freefall.freebsd.org (Satoshi Asami)
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 09:17:23 -0500 (EST)
Cc: mi@aldan.ziplink.net, asami@freefall.freebsd.org,
        freebsd-ports@freefall.freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199702130842.AAA27276@freefall.freebsd.org> from "Satoshi Asami" at "Feb 13, 97 00:42:57 am"
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL22 (25)]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: owner-ports@FreeBSD.ORG
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

Satoshi Asami said once:

> Synopsis: teTeX ports installs /usr/local/bin/mp of it's own
> 
> State-Changed-From-To: open-closed
> State-Changed-By: asami
> State-Changed-When: Thu Feb 13 00:41:25 PST 1997
> State-Changed-Why: 
> Thanks for the report, but I don't think we can do anything about
> this one.  If we start renaming files that conflict with another
> port, that may confuse a lot of people.

In this case, restoring things was easy -- print/mp is a small
port, and teTeX's bin/mp is just a symlink. But what about smth
harder to get/rebuild once overwritten? With the number of ports
growing (thanks, Satoshi!) this will be happening more and more.
I think, some mechanism has to be worked out. The confusion, IMHO,
is much worse when installed utilities or their parts or man-pages
disappear for no obvious reason. And this should not be left to
the port's maintainer, because programs may be completely unrelated
and very few people install everything.

Every port knows the files it installs (pkg/PLIST).  May be `make
install' should review the list and see if any of the files are
already there and (possibly) ask for confirmation... It can even
try to look up the pkg-database to find out whose files those are.

This, BTW, would also prevent my fine-tuned X11/app-defaults/Knews
from being overwritten by the new knews installation...

	-mi