UPDATING - needs updating?

[Vizion]

On Monday 21 November 2005 11:13,  the author Wesley Shields contributed to 
the dialogue on-
 Re: UPDATING - needs updating?: 

>On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 08:39:55AM -0800, Vizion wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> I have noticed that some earlier notices relating to some ports  in
>> UPDATING appear as though they have been made out of data by newer notices
>> (e.g  kde 20050804 seems to replace 20050324) and sometimes the
>> instructions conflict with one another. While I presuime the latest notice
>> always takes precedence I wonder if it would be possible to have notices
>> that are no longer current removed from UPDATING.
>
>I think this is probably a bad idea, simply from a historical
>perspective.  If I wanted to chase down a bug that was available only
>for a specified time period I would like to know the corresponding
>UPDATING entries.
My focus comes from the primary purpose of UPDATING - to help check the best 
way to update one's own ports(e.g the info on kde). Hence scanning a list of 
ports affected by UPDATING at the time of updating does seem best suited for 
that purpose and I wonder if the non current data might therefore be better 
shifted to something like UPDATING.history to fulfill the very real need you 
identify. 

>
>> I know I would find it useful to have  an html version of UPDATING with an
>> index page by port with a link to the notices.  How easy it would be to do
>> this automatically as UPDATING is upfated I do not know but I throw the
>> idea out there in case anyone feels like catching it.
>
>I believe freshports.org can do this already, though backwards.  Rather
>than looking through UPDATING for links to the individual ports you can
>find the corresponding entries in the individual ports themselves (see
>www.freshports.org/x11/xterm as an example).

Yep I am aware of that - but backwards is not what is needed in the contect od 
using UPDATING when updating one's systems. I see the hml index list as 
enabling one to scan the list of ports referred to on UPDATING and use that 
index to extract the information relevant to one's own system(s).

my two pennorth


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