using ports for things they were never meant to do

[Michelle Sullivan]

Julian Elischer wrote:
> So this seems to be  a speciality of mine.
>
> I often find that I need a ports tree at rev X except for some port 
> foo/bar that needs to be at some different rev (Y) to pick up  a 
> fix/change needed by the application. Now there is no reason that I 
> can't just edit the distinfo file and the Makefile and replace X with 
> Y, and that nearly always works if X and Y are not too different. I'd 
> prefer however to be able to upgrade the Makefile to the right level, 
> but that then hits the problem that he Makefile is using an API with 
> the rest of the ports system, that is rapidly changing. SO you have 
> much more chance of your build failing because of Makefile changes 
> than due to incompatibilities in the distfiles.
>
> My personal way of handing that would be to break the pkg rev out to a 
> separate file with nothing but PORTVERSION and PORTREVISION in it so 
> that the version of the distfile being fetched is divorced from the 
> ports API.  Then in my tree I update distinfo and the new Portrev and 
> leave the Makefile alone.
>
> Does anyone else have a better way to slide a particular port back or 
> ahead compared to the rest of the tree?
>
I have  perl script that looks at the new tree and compares it to the 
old (my custom) tree and automatically updates all the ports using the 
old API, adding and removing patches/patchfiles as it goes...  Also have 
half a dozen fixes in my tree for stuff that is just wrong (may still 
be, may not matter with the even changing nature of the FreeBSD 
tree.)... The script can also point at individual ports and do just 
those as necessary, and if it detects that I have manually put in a 
newer version it just goes and ignores all changes until the FreeBSD 
tree for that port catches up...

My advice, write your own that fixes the API to how you want it until 
you're ready to update the API or every time the API changes take it up 
the.... erm, enough of that please! :P

Regards,

Michelle