lang/php5 port

[Tom Worster]

On 12/17/08 1:05 PM, "Matthew Seaman" <m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk>
wrote:

> Tom Worster wrote:
> 
>> i'm certainly not smart enough to know what might be a better way to design
>> ports like php. but one thing seems odd to me. i ended up with dozens of
>> ports installed that appeared to use nothing but the same php-5.2.8.tar.bz2
>> distfile. relative to what i'm used to with php (i.e. manual configure,
>> compile, install) this seems a bit untidy and i'm nervous what it might mean
>> for maintenance.
> 
> Absolutely not.  Don't be confused that the various php5-foo ports all use
> the same distfile: it's a big lump of code, and the individual modules
> selectively
> compile bits of it.  Don't be perturbed that you have a large number of ports
> installed -- after all a port is ultimately just a set of files treated
> together
> as a block. This just means you're getting finer grained control over what
> you've
> got installed on your machine.

fair enough. this seems analogous to the long list of options i used to use
on ./configure when installing from the php tarball.


> No -- the current design of the way PHP is dealt with in ports is brilliant.
> 
> Consider the alternative -- in fact the way it used to be done.

relative to other ways of designing ports i can accept that the current one
is better. my point of view, however, is someone transitioning from manual
install to using lang/php5-extensions. it's new to me and i need to learn.
the conversation here has been very helpful (thanks again, all).

at the same time i'm transitioning from 6.2 to 7.0 and learning how to use
freebsd-update and portmaster. previously, upgrading freebsd was such a big
project that i'd do it on the production servers very infrequently and
reinstalling all the apps from scratch after os upgrade seemed acceptable.

but now it seems silly not to take advantage of the new automation tools for
freebsd and ports updates. hence learning to use ports for everything seems
like the way to go.