portupgrade -> portmaster Rosetta Stone?

[Chris Rees]

On 27 Feb 2012 22:53, "Doug Barton" <dougb at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> On 2/27/2012 12:04 PM, Olivier Smedts wrote:
> > 2012/2/27 Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org>:
> >> On 2/27/2012 11:53 AM, Olivier Smedts wrote:
> >>> What about a command line flag to ignore errors during backup package
> >>> creation?
> >>
> >> What about ... no. :)
> >
> > Don't get me wrong, portmaster is a great tool, reliable, and I'm
> > using it nearly daily.
> >
> > But why not, if there's a reason ? "potential foot shooting" ?
>
> It's a general philosophy thing that is common to mergemaster and
> portmaster. I feel *incredibly* strongly that it's important for key
> system management tools to *not* make unsafe assumptions. I (and by
> extension the tools that I write) have no way to know what changes are
> mission-critical to a given user. Therefore, I have *no business*
> merrily blowing stuff away that the user may have been depending on.
>
> In the particular case of creating backup packages, with or without the
> -b option, the default assumption is that those packages are being
> *relied* on by the user to roll back an update in case of catastrophe.
> For users that don't care about what happens with the backup packages
> there is already a command line option to disable creation of them. My
> assumption is that if the user is not using the option to disable them
> altogether that the backup packages must have value. (Also, a
> meta-issue, if the ports developers are doing their jobs then backup
> package creation failure should be an incredibly rare occurrence.)

+1

You could always email the maintainer with the OPTIONS you've used if you
get this error; it'll then get fixed!

Chris