HEADS-UP: Shared Library Versions bumped...

[Ben Morrow]

Quoth Andrew Reilly <andrew-freebsd at areilly.bpc-users.org>:
> On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 03:30:33PM -0400, David Schultz wrote:
> > I do the same thing.  I wish the ports system kept track of which
> > ports were installed explicitly by me, and which were only
> > dependencies.  Then it would be possible to garbage collect ports
> > that are no longer needed.
> 
> Portmaster -s will cull ports that are "no longer depended on".
> Seems to work fairly well.
> 
> You can (probably) find the list of ports that you installed
> deliberately by trawling through /var/db/pkg for those that
> don't have a +REQUIRED_BY file.  (The portmaster -s trick works
> by finding ports that have a +REQUIRED_BY file that is empty, I
> believe.)

The problem with that is if you install pkg A deliberately, but it then
later becomes a dependancy of pkg B. If you remove pkg B (because it's
no longer needed) there is then no evidence that pkg A was installed on
purpose, rather than incidentally. portmaster -s will offer to remove
it, and if you refuse it will offer to remove the empty +REQUIRED_BY,
effectively promoting it to a 'manually installed' pkg again, though
it's perhaps not entirely clear from the question that that is what the
effect will be.

This would be easy to solve in general by maintaining a 'world' package,
or some such, that had dependencies on everything installed explicitly;
but that would require modifying all the pkg and port installation tools
(probably including bsd.port.mk itself) to support that convention.

Ben