portupgrade ideas page

[Fernan Aguero]

+----[ Hans Lambermont <hans at lambermont.dyndns.org> (07.Jun.2006 13:44):
|
| Sergey Matveychuk wrote:
| 
| > Portupgrade ideas page was created on our wiki server:
| > http://wiki.freebsd.org/portupgrade
| > I would like to hear your ideas, wishes and comments.
| 
| - improved robustness :

[snipped]

|   - warn about UPDATING entries for ports that upgrade 'over'
|     (time-wise) such an entry before upgrading starts, maybe even
|     default to requiring a 'do continue' user action.
|
+----]

Some time ago, I suggested on the list the idea of having a
periodic script that would check entries in UPDATING against
the list of installed ports and warn the user ("a notice in
UPDATING has been made for port X that you have installed").
Much like portaudit does when checking against VUXML, and
much like what you're suggesting, but this time incorporated
into portupgrade.

I even proposed to code it and abandoned the idea right
away. The problem is that UPDATING lacks important
information about the affected ports.

Suppose you parse the file and notice that mail/fetchmail is
an affected port and the user has fetchmail-6.3.4_1
installed ... how can you tell if fetchmail-6.3.4_1 is
affected (and the user has to be warned) or if the notice
only applies to fetchmail versions prior to 6.3.4? The only
thing in UPDATING that might be used to tell this is the
date string (20060512), but then you have to make a call to
the cvs repo to link the date with a specific PORTVERSION
or PORTREVISION.

So, to get this functionality, we have to change
UPDATING first to add more information (at least PORTVERSION
and PORTREVISION) to each entry.

Time for a RFC about UPDATING? 

Fernan