From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jan 5 22:47:02 2015 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ports@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher AECDH-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 88BFFD68; Mon, 5 Jan 2015 22:47:02 +0000 (UTC) Received: from smtp02.lnh.mail.rcn.net (smtp02.lnh.mail.rcn.net [207.172.157.102]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 299D33FCB; Mon, 5 Jan 2015 22:47:01 +0000 (UTC) X-Auth-ID: anat Received: from devlanhide.timeinc.net (HELO utka.zajac) ([209.251.200.245]) by smtp02.lnh.mail.rcn.net with ESMTP; 05 Jan 2015 17:45:52 -0500 Message-ID: <54AB1420.9090101@aldan.algebra.com> Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 17:45:52 -0500 From: "Mikhail T." User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD i386; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.6.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "portmgr@FreeBSD.org" Subject: Support for "partial upgrades" Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Content-Filtered-By: Mailman/MimeDel 2.1.18-1 Cc: ports@FreeBSD.org X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.18-1 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 22:47:02 -0000 Hello! A prominent committer stated today : "We do not support partial upgrades, never had, never will." He then elaborated, that by "partial upgrades" he meant building a port from an updated tree without first rebuilding all of the already-installed ports. Whatever the deal may be with perl5-versions (subject of the above PR), I'd like voice my concern about the "do not, never had, never will" part. For we certainly "had" supported such things. For example, the ability of a port to LIB_DEPEND on a shared-library without a specific major-number was added -- 12 years ago -- exactly to better support such a "partial upgrades": 1. Build everything. 2. Update your ports-tree. 3. Try to build one more thing. And we still "do" support such handling of LIB_DEPENDS -- even if another prominent committer does not know about it . While no "guarantees" can be provided by a free software project (indeed, even commercial ones usually do not), it is rather unreasonable to demand, the user rebuilds /everything/ in order to be able to build one more port from an updated tree... I'd argue, that one simply can not comply with this policy, while maintaining a FreeBSD system usable for anything /other/ than testing the rebuilds themselves and show-casing... Unless, of course, portmgr@ wants us all to switch to prebuilt binaries (and Koolbuntu), that is... It is one thing to say "yeah, this might not work -- send us patches": we may not be able to /afford/ the ideal (due to shortage of people and/or material resources), but we agree on /what the ideal is/. It becomes different, when the response is "this should not work, never worked, never will"... I'd like to see us continuing to recognize, that one FreeBSD install may differ from another, and ports not having gratuitously-strict dependencies and requirements... Could portmgr@, please, (re)affirm this goal and otherwise clarify the matter for the benefit of mortals and the body's own members alike? Thank you! -mi