UPDATING - needs updating?

[Wesley Shields]

On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 12:59:07PM -0800, Vizion wrote:
> 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 that are no longer current removed from UPDATING.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 just remember the last entry I read.  If you can't remember it you can
manually mark it or write it down somewhere.  I think forcing people to
look in two different files is just making it more difficult than it
needs to be.

> >> 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).

If nothing like this has been done already I'll work on a solution soon.
I think it's a good idea, though it may be difficult to catch all the
entries for a given port as there is no well defined syntax to follow
in the updates.  I'll have to think about this a bit more...

-- WXS