Library Infrastructure Proposal & Home Page

[Simon Marlow]

> This is true for the FreeBSD base system, but it is 
> recommended nowadays
> to use sysutils/portupgrade for managing ports. With 
> portupgrade you can
> simply do `portupgrade -rf changed_pkg` to recompile all packages
> depending on the changed one. The only reason why portupgrade is not
> part of the base system is that it is written in ruby and we are not
> willing to include ruby in the base.

Heh, I've been using portupgrade for a while but managed to miss that.
I usually use it in '-Rr' mode.

<rant>
Nevetheless, this behaviour ought to be the default.  I strongly believe
in this principle:

  Using the standard package tools on a system, in their default
  configuration, it should be impossible to end up with an inconsistent
  set of installed packages.

Sadly, on FreeBSD and Gentoo this is all too easy.

FreeBSD even lets you install several different versions of a package on
top of each other - so that when you delete one of them, it deletes some
the files belonging to the other version too (only some, because it does
the md5 checksum thing).  This drives me nuts.  At least Gentoo is
better in this regard.

And the portupgrade scripts try to work around the problems with the
FreeBSD ports system by looking for inconsistencies in the database and
applying heuristics to try to figure out how they should be fixed.  This
is crazy - it should be impossible to get the inconsistencies in the
first place.
</rant>

Cheers,
	Simon