Historical question about INDEX-file in /usr/ports

[Erik Trulsson]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 03:36:49PM +0200, Stevan Tiefert wrote:
> Hello list,
> 
> a small question for the expirienced users of FreeBSD:
> 
> At which time the name of "INDEX.db" to "INDEX-?.db" changed? (I suppose 
> during the creating time of FreeBSD 6) And then it was changed, was the 
> database format also been changed?

The "INDEX.db" / "INDEX-?.db" files are created by (I believe) portsupgrade
and are not really part of the ports tree as such.
I don't know if they have changed the database format, but I doubt it.

The 'base' files are just plain textfiles named "INDEX" / "INDEX-?".
As far as I know their format hasn't changed in a long time either.

The switch from plain "INDEX" to "INDEX-5" (etc.) happened in 2002 in time
for FreeBSD 5.  The reason was that the dependencies for ports could vary
quite a bit between 4.x and 5.x. (In particular perl was part of the base
system in 4.x, but not in 5.x and later - meaning that all ports that had
perl as a dependency (and there are many of them) would depend on the perl
port when built on a 5.x system but not on a 4.x system.)


The relevant commit message (for ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk) would be:

----------------------------
revision 1.436
date: 2002/12/04 17:17:48;  author: kris;  state: Exp;  lines: +8 -3
Add the INDEXFILE variable, that defaults to INDEX-5 on 5.0 (500036) and
later, and INDEX on earlier systems.  Use this in the 'make index' and
associated targets.  This is necessary to deal with the substantially
different dependencies of ports between 4.x and 5.0 (e.g. ports that
depend on perl).
----------------------------


(Support for INDEX-6, INDEX-7, etc. was added later.)



-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se