portupgrade -ar (why?)

Gerard Seibert gerard at seibercom.net
Sat Oct 15 11:42:55 PDT 2005


On Saturday, October 15, 2005 2:32:25 PM, Jan Grant <Jan.Grant at bristol.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: portupgrade -ar (why?)
Wrote these words of wisdom:

> On Sat, 15 Oct 2005, Peter Matulis wrote:
> 
> > What is the use of specifying the 'r' switch when using the 'a'
> > switch?
> > 
> > # portupgrade -ar
> > 
> > This says to upgrade all ports plus the ones that depend on all
> > those ports.  Am I missing something?  Wouldn't "the ones that
> > depend" be upgraded anyway?
> 
> Not necessarily. For instance: package P might use library L. A change 
> in L might alter the size and layout of structures exposed to P. The 
> source-level API of L is unchanged; the binary-level ABI is altered. So 
> whilst the source code of P might not have changed, it might (for 
> instance) be using a macro defined by a header in L that will look at 
> the wrong offset in the new structure. These kinds of ABI compatibility 
> problems can be fixed by recompilihng P.
> 
> 
> -- 
> jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
> Tel +44 (0)117 3317661   http://ioctl.org/jan/
> Strive to live every day as though it was last Wednesday.

***** REPLY SEPARATOR *****
On 10/11/2005 5:29:42 PM, Gerard Replied:

That is one of the reasons I use portmanager. It takes care of those
requirements without any additional instructions.

-- 
Gerard Seibert
gerard at seibercom.net

	You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in
	common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter
	the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable if you
	happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

		Dr. Who, in "The Face of Evil"


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