portmaster and meaning of --show-work

[Doug Barton]

On 1/25/2010 9:30 AM, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> Doug Barton wrote:
>
>> Funny you should mention that. :) The current svn version of portmaster
>> (users/dougb/portmaster) has this exact feature, and it's almost ready
>> to be committed to the port. It's currently on by default, and I just
>> need to add a knob to disable it, and some code to override it if the
>> only thing to do is the one port the user specified on the command line.
>> I may get to that today, but $REALLIFE has been kicking my *hrmph*
>> lately, so it may not be done till the weekend. I would appreciate it if
>> you would give that a look and tell me if it suits your needs. It's
>> likely that once I'm 100% convinced that this new feature is the right
>> way to go that I will drop the --show-work option altogether.
> 
> I upgraded to portmaster-2.17 with this new feature and it is really nice!

Thanks. :)

> One little idea to next improvement (and next work for you ;])
> There can be some configuration variable / env. variable to control the
> situation when "proceed" question will be asked:
> 1] always

It's on by default except for the case where you specify one or more
ports on the command line and those are the ONLY things that will
happen. In that case it doesn't seem necessary to prompt the user.

> 2] only if something new will be installed
> 3] never

"Never" can be done with the --no-confirm option, or by placing the
appropriate value in .portmasterrc (see the man page).

> And one more question - how hard (for you / portmaster) is to monitor
> changes of dependencies before/after upgrade of some port? It can be
> useful if portmaster can report dependencies which will not be needed
> after upgrade (as part of the final report = after "The following
> actions were performed" list)

The -s feature already exists for this. I don't think it would be
generally useful to run this code after every use of portmaster since
the trend is for dependencies to go up, not down. But I do recommend
that people use the -e feature when they uninstall ports which does run
-s for them when they are done.


hth,

Doug

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