Upgrade suggestion

[Danny Pansters]

On Tuesday 27 March 2007 01:40:40 Gary Kline wrote:
> 	Hi Folks,
>
> 	Last night it struck me that one reason I constantly find new
> 	ports to upgrade is that with ~17K ports, if you're running one
> 	of the more common desktop managers and several popular apps,
> 	there are going to be at least a dozen minor tweaks every day.
> 	E.g.:going from foo-1.6.7_2  to foo-1.6.7_3.   I used to run
> 	port[upgrade|manager] twice/week.  Was swamped; recently,
> 	upgrading things daily.   Since a lot of the wm ports take
>
> 	> 24 hours to build/re-build, I'm pretty much wedged.   Thus

But you don't *have* to rebuild all the time. I'd wager to say that it's 
foolish to do so. When you have, e.g. a nice open-office, compiled with, say, 
the KDE option, there's no immediate need to update the beast if it happens 
to be updated. Maybe if it's a security fix, but otherwise if the thing works 
well for you, no need to update. Unless you want to of course. I do a massive 
portupgrade every 1-2 months on my desktop and I don't feel I'm missing out 
(and if I do I'll do that update earlier). And yes, usually there's a thing 
or two that I have to fix manually. It will happen also if you 
csup-through-cron every day. Perhaps more often. I think you're trying to 
overdo whilst still trying to minimize build time (= stability shall we say) 
and such. They're two conflicting goals. 

>
> 	this suggestion  (for all port/package upgrade suites):
> 	have a flag, say 'u' for "urgent" when *foo*" goes from
> 	foo-1.6.7 to -1.6.8  or else when/if foo makes a critical
> 	fix.

We have more than one port update tools (and they do somewhat different 
things), that would complicate things a lot I think (what color is yer 
bikeshed), and such a thing would probably need to be in the binary update 
(Colin's) stuff too. 

> 	I Would've loved to have joined into the Coding ``love-in''
> 	this coming summer,  but my shoulder said,  "ARE YOU AN IDIOT!"
> 	so not now.   Besides, other tasks await.

<contro>
IMHO the sooner Google or in general the second IT/OSS boom fizzles out and 
stops solliciting what in the end equals free labor the better. Just my 
opinion. I don't trust them. They just want to have their fishing spot in 
their own backyard just like MS and Sun and Apple and Novell and they want it 
on the cheap. Once the "IP wars" go all out they are not going to give one 
damn about the original author of a work that has become theirs or what (s)he 
thinks or believes. 
</versial>

I think if you want certain things in ports/packages to change or to have (yet 
another) alternative management tool, the thing to do is to write it and PR 
it. It will also give you the largest amount of control. And I bet you can do 
it.

> 	Flames to /dev/null,guys; rational responses see-vous-play.
>
> 	gary
>
> 	....Still trying to learn French :-)

Meh. l'Amour et l'enfer are all you need to know. Oh, yeah, and fries of 
course. That's s'il vous-plait (needs two ^'s on both i's IIRC). I also found 
it useful to know where the Rue des Bons-Enfants was in Paris but you 
probably don't. Very off-topic :)

> 	PS:  I hopefully will be upgrading//getting a faster used server
> 	     to replace TAO.  Even if that resolves part of my upgrade
> 	     problem, I think we can do lots better with maintaining
> 	     current ports.

A week or so ago, you were asking about packages and if they might be offered 
by port submitters. I think if submitters would use tinderbox to build 
packages it may be much easier to get pkgs that are all from (somewhat or 
even exactly) the same pristine build environment. That's one idea I thought 
of (some port maintainers and most committers use it). I wonder if it might 
be too much to ask of our submitters/maintainers though.

Dan