HEADSUP: FLAVORS (initial version) and subpackages proposals

[Franco Fichtner]

> On 20 Dec 2016, at 9:27 AM, Franco Fichtner <franco at lastsummer.de> wrote:
> 
> We shouldn't use "-" or "/" anyway, should we?  Please no fancy things
> like "~" or so.  No arbitrary package names...

To emphasise on this:

A flavour should act as a full replacement of its unflavoured package, that
means the package name must be kept.  Only one flavour (or unflavoured)
package can be installed at all times.  As an example:

A weird package "foo" requires "vim", but the user doesn't want to deal with
X11, the user should be able to:

# pkg install vim:lite foo

This should not try to change "vim:lite" to "vim".

# pkg install vim

This should be perfectly fine afterwards, too.

Every "vim" should act as "vim", not revoking the integrity of the package
dependency on vim during e.g. pkg upgrade.  No forced install should be
needed to do this as long as the shared libraries and dependencies are still
satisfied.  And maybe the moral of the story is that flavours should not
be depended on by default, although it could be a possibility for special
cases.

This is something that is really really needed.  An very good example would
be Suricata package with Hyperscan right now, where Hyperscan does not work
on all amd64 architectures, so we need to have a replacement package.  But
if that replacement package without Hyperscan needs to be a separate port,
any package depending on Suricata (e.g. a distribution or GUI package) will
complain about the missing dependency and try to undo a Suricata-No-Hyperscan
package[1] as it conflicts and changes back to the defunct package on upgrade.


Cheers,
Franco

[1] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=210490