Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 23:28:38 -0500 From: "Matthew Emmerton" <matt@gsicomp.on.ca> To: <freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: NetBSD package system features Message-ID: <005b01c059bc$d8bc32b0$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca> References: <00112811292900.19785@nightshade>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> For one thing, it has more "make" targets. Has anyone looked into > incorporating these? Here are some noteworthy examples. For more > info, see <ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/pkgsrc/Packages.txt>; > > * update: > This target causes the current package to be updated to the latest > version. The package and all depending packages first get > deinstalled, then current versions of the corresponding packages > get compiled and installed. This is similar to manually noting > which packages are currently installed, then performing a series of > "make deinstall" and and "make install" (or whatever DEPENDS_TARGET > is set to) for these packages. This target scares me. Why? It is not uncommon to find an improperly-designed port in which the deinstall target *removes* configuration files. On a production system, this can be disastrous. (Case in point - I once did a 'make deinstall install' of my installed Apache+SSL+FP port a long while ago. Unfortunately it axed the config file (40 individually-configured vhosts and a whole whack of custom rewrite rules). Luckily I had a few hours to spare and recreated the config from memory. (Yes, there was a backup - but on an offline tape in another city.) For an inexperienced sysadmin, going into the root of the ports tree and saying "make update" would be a real neat thing to do, but it could end up trashing configurations and install versions of programs which among other things expect different configuration files and/or do things quite differently. (For example, cyrus-1.5.x vs cyrus-1.6.x. Or different releases of cyrus-sasl 1.5.x.) Perhaps I'm overreacting, but the ability for an 'update' target to work properly requires the semantics of the currently-intalled packages to not differ from the to-be-installed packages. In many cases, this is simply not the case. -- Matt Emmerton To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?005b01c059bc$d8bc32b0$1200a8c0>