Projects with multiple versions in our ports tree

[Ade Lovett]

On Aug 13, 2004, at 00:16, Jun Kuriyama wrote:
> I'm using "foo" port as mainstream version and "fooXX" port as forked
> / obsoleted versions (and I think this tradition is still alive, isn't
> it?)

This only works when there is an identifiable "mainstream" version.  
Since the autotools stuff was mentioned, pretty much all of them can be 
considered "mainstream" given the massive incompatibilities between 
versions (yes, I'd love to have just libtool,autoconf and automake, but 
it just ain't going to happen).

One thing that slightly bugs me are ports that effectively include the 
version number twice, for example:

	cd /usr/ports/dns/bind9 && make -V PKGNAME
	bind9-9.2.3

To my mind, that should really read bind-9.2.3, with appropriate 
LATEST_LINK magic.

I think that would go some of the way to help reduce confusion.  I'm 
really not keen on the idea of having a "foo" port as a subport of 
"foo<num>", since if things start depending on "foo" as opposed to 
"foo<num>", then we have the nastiness associated when foo is changed 
to point to a new "foo<newnum>" port.

Of course, this is something of an "emotional" issue, as is anything to 
do with port-naming (just like machine-naming, everyone has their own 
opinion on how it should look :), but I truly believe that a good first 
step would be to eliminate the "double-versioning" in some ports (bind 
is merely an example, there are plenty of others).

-aDe