suggestion for pkgdb from ports-mgmt/portupgrade: add more explanation

Michel TALON talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr
Thu Sep 1 14:39:26 UTC 2011


Julian H. Stacey wrote:

> Suggestion: pkgdb is too cryptic even with -v,
> it needs more explanation what it is up to & 
> particularly what decisions it asks from user
> .....


This is a point i have studied a long time, notably i have read the ruby
code doing that. There are a lot of heuristics doing automatic choices,
when they fail they ask the end user. The whole stuff is quite
complicated, and asking questions to the user is certainly not the
solution, since he has no business knowing the necessary details. In
practice he does arbitrary (usually bad) choices and the system
degrades. In general one should always be able to make these decisions
automatically using the MOVED file, which is what portmaster does
(barring some exceptions which occur from time to time and are supposed
to be documented in UPDATING - which is an offense to the automaticity
of the system). I thing that portupgrade should be modified to remove
all those heuristics and use MOVED, but the code is not so obvious to
understand, and ruby (as far as i am concerned) doesn't help. Finally
the file UPDATING should be forcefully removed from the system, and
ports maintainers should get at the same effect through means which
don't prevent automatisation (for example upping the revision levels of
all appropriate ports, even if they are very numerous). At the end of
the day, portupgrade is so awfully slow that i think moving away from
ruby could also help in this respect.

-- 

Michel TALON



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