portmaster -s text (Was: Re: HEADS-UP: Shared Library Versions bumped)

[Doug Barton]

On Tue, 28 Jul 2009, Ben Morrow wrote:

> Yes, I can see it needs to be an option. Presumably 'don't ask me again' is 
> too Microsoft :)? Maybe something like 'Mark this package as explicitly 
> required?'? That's pretty much the user-visible effect.

Thanks for the suggestions.

> I know the first time I saw that message, when I didn't really understand 
> what it meant, my reaction was 'Delete something? No!' which wasn't the right 
> answer.

Yeah, looking back on this from the user perspective it wasn't the best 
choice of messages.

> No. I have occasionally wondered if a sensible solution would be to drop 
> portmaster/portupgrade altogether and just maintain a local sysutils/world 
> port with a list of what I want installed, and 'make deinstall reinstall' 
> whenever it changes (with something like pkg_cutleaves to clear out the 
> trash). I suspect I would lose something I'm currently relying on (certainly, 
> portmaster's -o and -r options wouldn't be trivial to emulate) but it does 
> seem to me that both portmaster and portupgrade spend an awful lot of time 
> doing things like tracking dependancies that bsd.port.mk already does for 
> you.

I can't speak for portupgrade but the vast majority of time with 
portmaster is actually spent building the port. The updating of 
/var/db/pkg is trivial in comparison. What portmaster does that 
bsd.port.mk by itself does not is allow you to update dependencies in 
place instead of having to uninstall the things that depend on them first, 
then reinstall them after the update.


hth,

Doug

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