Ability for maintainers to update own ports

[Kris Kennaway]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2003 at 01:11:21PM -0500, Charles Swiger wrote:

> Branching ports might help out people who try to update their ports 
> while running older versions of FreeBSD (yes, I understand that 
> supporting older versions is at a low priority, but this would address 
> some user expectations/complaints), and it might smooth "cataclysmic 
> events" involving changes to the ports infrastructure, changes to 
> -CURRENT which break lots of ports, etc.

I'm not interested in supporting old releases..it's too much work.
More broadly speaking, there doesn't seem to be significant interest
from the community to provide support for old releases.  If there was,
it's something that could be provided by a group of interested members
of this list.

> However, I'm not sure we need to branch the ports CVS repository to 
> address these issues: what happens if we use CVS tags to indicate which 
> OS versions and/or hardware architectures a port works on?

There's no way that we can reasonably guarantee that tagged ports will
work together (e.g. what happens when a dependency changes?), so
tagging has minimal benefit.  We already provide this level of minimal
support for people who want to try to mix and match old ports, namely
people can use cvs to manage their ports tree and update ports to
whichever CVS revision they like.

> One could then have successful builds on bento perform the tagging
> in an automated fashion.

That's not really feasible.

Kris
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