Portmaster with package support ready for beta testing

[Doug Barton]

Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> Does it mean that one needs ports tree or provide custom INDEX in case
> of custom packages with non default options (different dependencies) to
> compute order od dependencies?

The INDEX file is not involved at all. Portmaster still uses the ports
tree only to determine dependencies. This actually leads to the
ability to set different dependencies from the default while still
using packages, although for the moment I have it set up so that if
you use one of the --packages options it implies -G (no config run)
since I'm not 100% sure that using dependencies different from how the
packages were built will work in all cases.

> (AFAIK plain pkg_add works without ports tree and INDEX, that's why I am
> asking)

AFAIK you're correct. However plain pkg_add is a plain installation
tool, it's not an upgrade/management tool. In order to determine
whether something needs to be upgraded you have to have a frame of
reference. :)

One of the items on my funding proposal is to incorporate support for
the INDEX file into portmaster, although no one has specifically
chosen that as a feature to support yet (while several have
specifically requested package support). My plan once the package code
is "done" is to add up the "General" contributions that haven't been
allotted to the work on package support and go back up the list of
features, including INDEX support.

> It is related to my idea of extending packages with more metadata, for
> example OS version + arch, used build options (WITH_ / WITHOUT_ etc.) so
> one can easily determine "how this package was built".

I agree that this would be useful. See also
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=106483 which portmaster is
doing currently in its own code.

> But it seems as
> not so easy task to me, as I don't know how to get all the options (from
> /etc/make.conf, environment variables, /var/db/ports, commandline...)
> and record them to file in useful way.

Well some of those things that you mentioned have fairly
straightforward solutions, but I agree that the
not-directly-ports-related stuff (like make.conf) would be harder.
Good luck with that. :)


Doug

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