portmaster and BROKEN ports

[Doug Barton]

Daniel Roethlisberger wrote:

> Of course the user wants to be notified of all ports which cannot be
> upgraded for some reason (broken, marked BROKEN, removed/missing origin,
> etc.), but forcing the upgrade to abort because of a problem with a
> single port does not make sense. 

It may not make sense to you, but since I have no way of knowing what 
the user wants to do with a broken port unless they actually take some 
kind of action, it makes perfect sense to me.

> It means that portmaster can only be
> run successfully if all the installed ports are in a 100% upgradable
> state,

If you're talking about running 'portmaster -a' without ever having to 
pay attention to what happens, then yes, you're probably right. But 
there are a lot of other ways to use portmaster, and a lot of users that 
do not have as many poorly maintained ports as you seem to be stuck with. :)

> To keep a box current with portmaster, I have to manually mark each of
> the non-upgradable ports with +IGNOREME files after portmaster bails
> out, and restart portmaster.  I will then have to periodically check
> back manually whether the problems went away in the meantime.  This is
> unacceptable for me; too much manual intervention.
> 
> I would very much prefer to have an option that tells portmaster to skip
> non-upgradable ports and those that depend on them, and notify me in
> form of a concise, greppable list after the portmaster run.

That sounds like a great idea, if I ever find the time (or a sponsor) to 
write that code, I think it would be a nice addition. (And btw, I would 
argue that ignoring updates for ports that depend on a broken port is 
not necessarily the best default action.)

Meanwhile, you're talking about two entirely different problem sets 
here. In regards to the second issue (what happens when a port you 
+IGNOREME'ed is no longer broken) portmaster already has the ability to 
notify you that an update is ready for an ignored port, and will prompt 
you to update it even if there is an +IGNOREME file (assuming you're not 
using -u).

> This is actually the number one reason I switched back to portupgrade.

That's actually Ok with me. :) Portupgrade is a good tool, and it has a 
lot of features that portmaster does not, and probably will never have. 
I have said many times that I do not intend portmaster to be a 
"portupgrade replacement." If portupgrade meets your needs better, then 
by all means you should use it.

Doug

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