Upgrade Tool

[Ulrich Spoerlein]

Aren Olvalde Tyr wrote:
> Perhaps it would be good, if, say on the corresponding port entry on the 
> FreeBSD ports webpage, it listed all the options used for building the binary 
> package. For example, for the "Package" link, instead of simply linking to 
> the package, it could link to a page entry listing all of the build options 
> used, with the package download link at the bottom. Or something like that. 
> 
> Just an idea. What do people think? 

I'd even go further. This is something I have been thinking about on and
off. Namely, a FLAVOUR system for packages. A maintainer specifies up to
three FLAVOURs per port, which set various flags for building the port.

These might be full|normal|minimal or mysql|pgsql, etc. The package
build cluster will then produce a package for each flavour. The problem
is to integrate this with the pkg_* tools. Should the packages be called
foo-1.2.3_1-minimal.tbz2? Which version do you get if you pkg_add -r
foo? etc. This is where I don't see a clever way of integration.

If, and only if, the flavours only differ in some files of their plists
(the binaries and lib, perhaps) it might even be beneficial to lump all
different flavours into one package. Sure, the bin and libs then take up
three times the space, but all stuff in share is only required once. A
clever pkg_add can then look up which flavours are inside a package, and
which flavours have all their dependencies satisfied, if there are
conflicts, etc. I'm just dreaming here ...

What sparked this idea, is that there is no mplayer package (at least, I
didn't find one). This is probably, because it depends on some codecs,
which can be redistributed. The idea now is to leave the port as it is,
so people can still 'make install' it like before. But the package build
cluster will produce a mplayer FLAVOUR called 'unrestricted' which will
depend solely on, well, unrestricted packages. Thus, we get a
redistributeable mplayer package. Yay!

The maintainer might even specify unrestricted|minimal|full flavours, so
people don't need to set dozens of WITH_FOO=yes, but can simple run
'make WITH_FLAVOUR=full install'.

Ulrich Spoerlein

PS: I used the mplayer port/package purely for demonstrative purposes!
-- 
 PGP Key ID: 20FEE9DD				Encrypted mail welcome!
Fingerprint: AEC9 AF5E 01AC 4EE1 8F70  6CBD E76E 2227 20FE E9DD
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy?
Don't know. Don't care.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/attachments/20060504/ab2c87e5/attachment.pgp