RUN_DEPENDS and portmaster

[Thomas Mueller]

Excerpt from STefan Esser:

> I have been using a portmaster-rewrite for many months, which is ready  
> for release except for some performance tuning. (The portmaster in ports
> is not un-maintainable, but it's hard to modify a monolithic 4000 line  
> shell script that uses global variables to pass state and recursive
> invocation of itself to provide local state when required.)

> The performance problems are caused by bad design of the FLAVOR feature,
> which ignored the requirements of tools like portmaster (I've written
> about this at length when FLAVOR support had been committed).

> Synth is a non-starter for me, since it is written in Ada and only
> available on i386/amd64. I have plans to implement the functionality
> of synth in portmaster (not really hard, since the complex parts are
> the logic that deals with moved ports and conflicts, while the actual
> port building is simple). Portmaster can already create packages
> without installing them (unless they are BUILD_DEPENDS of some later
> port, of course) and you can populate your local repository with
> portmaster.

> Different from poudriere or synth, portmaster adapts to the preferences
> of the user (and e.g. upgrades samba48 used by some port that specifies
> a dependency on samba46, if the system already has an outdated samba48
> installed).

> Portmaster will use what's available on a system and does allow selective
> upgrades (keeping some ports at a back-level on purpose, but still upgrade
> other ports that depend on them), while a poudirere/pkg based upgrade will
> typically require all dependencies to exactly match what was present at
> the time the package was built (in a clean environment, not resembling the
> system the packages are going to be installed on).

Why is Ada only available on i386/amd64?  I don't think gcc is so limited.  Or is it an idiosyncrasy of Dragonlace?

This discussion of portmaster prompts me to ask, what is the status of portupgrade?

I used portupgrade at first but subsequently switched to portmaster.

On this computer, synth crashes, sometimes making the system crash.  But I am in NetBSD as I type this.

Tom