Utility for safe updating of ports in base system

[Denise H. G.]

Michel Talon <talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr> writes:

> On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 05:59:28PM +0800, Denise H. G. wrote:
>> Michel Talon <talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr> writes:
>> 
>> Actually I don't think a batch download and install process would help
>> much, especially for a freshly installed system because it might be a
>> huge download job and much waiting time if one is going to install
>> GNOME/KDE etc. from scratch. Perhaps the new `pkg_upgrade' could provide
>> versatile options to complete such tasks.
>> 
>
> In fact a batch download, followed by batch install is much faster than 
> constant interspersing of backup, download, install, etc. like 
> portupgrade does. In particular there is only one ftp connection for
> downloading everything which cuts on time, and you can do backups at the

Yes, you are right. I just think that people could have options while
doing things. This would make the world more satisfying.

> same time. If you don't beleive me you can try the prototype (in python)
> that i have written a year ago, and which does precisely that:
> http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~talon/pkgupgrade
> (which needs http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~talon/pkg_save.py)
> Most of the time in the script is spent recomputing the INDEX for all
> installed files, because i assumed the INDEX is not necessarily up to
> date.
>
>

Yes, I've had great impressions by the debian's apt- tools. But it seems
that the debian package servers maintain an index or something for all
the packages. And if you want to upgrade or install a certain package,
you just fetch the meta info for that package from the package server
and do a comparison with your local index. This makes versioned
dependencies rather easy to play around.


>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Denise H. G. <darcsis AT gmail DOT com>

-- 
Denise H. G. <darcsis AT gmail DOT com>