Efficiency & correctness for port version upgrades

[David Wolfskill]

I have been using portmaster for updating the installed ports on
may machines -- thanks, Doug!

I'm in the habit of updating on a daily basis -- directly after the
"smoke-test" boot of a newly-rebuilt stable/7 (before I go on to
build stable/8).

This morning, I noticed the (20100730) entry in UPDATING on www/neon28
-> www/neon29, so I made sure to complete that before doing the
"svn update" on my stable/8 working directory.  [This is one place
where having the revision control system in ports, vs. base, is a
bit of a nuisance -- but that's off-topic for this note.]

The instructions given for portmaster were:

  Portmaster users:
        portmaster -o www/neon29 www/neon28
        portmaster -r neon29-

which is fine, in that it works.

However:  It also causes www/neon29 to be built twice; I cannot
help but question the extent to which this is actually desired.

Granted, on my build machine, it only took 2-3 extra minutes.  But
I expect that on my laptop, it will take a bit longer.  And I'm
really a bit more concerned with the general case: consider, for
example, were lang/gcc44 replaced in a similar fashion.

Perhaps the second invocation should be adjusted to exclude the port
that was just installed?

Failing that, perhaps the first invocation should be modified so
portmaster would not clean up after itself (so the second invocation
would merely re-install, vs. re-build, then re-install)?

Or is the re-build and re-installation actually necessary for
correctness for some reason I'm overlooking?

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Depriving a girl or boy of an opportunity for education is evil.

aee http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
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