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

[Stanislav Sedov]

On Fri, 2 Sep 2011 11:39:14 +0200
Michel Talon <talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr> mentioned:

> 
> Your answer is very interesting and allows me to go further in the
> reasoning. Indeed the UPDATING file is here to solve edge cases. My
> point is that there shouldn't be any edge cases, if there are some it is
> because something somewhere has been ill designed, which is not so
> suprising since the system has been conceived by Jordan Hubbard when the
> number and complexity of ports was much smaller. I certainly don't have 
> any precise idea of the things which should be changed so that edge
> cases disappear, only *very experienced* people having observed a lot
> of failure cases could give correct advices. It is not impossible to
> design a system which works automatically without having any recourse to
> manual intervention, after all, as much as it may displease some people
> here, it is a fact that Debian works this way (and Debian-like systems
> like Ubuntu). Having a file which documents manual intervention is a
> perpetual tentation to do the things the sloppy way, which in fact
> frequently occurs in FreeBSD. As long as such a behavior continues, the
> authors of portupgrade, portmaster etc. are building on sand.
> 

I've actually been pondering around the idea of having a special version of
UPDATING for portmaster/portupgrade so they can do things automatically
without user intervention.  For most of the rough cases we just ask the
user to give specific instructions to portmaster/portupgrade and all of this
can be performed in a fully automatic way.

-- 
Stanislav Sedov
ST4096-RIPE

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