database tables for VuXML

[Jacques Vidrine]

[freebsd-vuxml@ dropped]

On Aug 27, 2004, at 10:55 PM, Will Andrews wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 02:17:45PM -0500, Jacques Vidrine wrote:
>> You accidently answered my question :-)  I guess you have set those
>> whenever the commit mail came in ... so the view of past package
>> versions is from past executions of `make -V'.
>>
>> I wish I could `cd /usr/ports/some/app && make package-names' to get a
>> list of all package names this port ever built.  or some such.
>
> That's really hard to implement, because ports are highly
> interdependent.  To do this properly, you would need to checkout
> the entire ports tree n times, where n is the number of times
> PKGNAME has changed in the history of the ports tree.  Plus, they
> can vary depending on options.  Suffice it to say, getting all
> this information would be astronomically difficult.  :-)

Yes, difficult.  I was curious whether one could check out the ports 
tree from, oh, say 1996, and still get `make -VPKGNAME' to work on most 
of the ports that were functional then.  But not curious enough to try 
:-)

Of course, I suppose generating all the back history could be done 
once, and then this database of history could be updated on a regular 
basis in much the same way that FreshPorts is updated continuously.  
But it sure would be a PITA for marginally useful trivia :-)

Cheers,
-- 
Jacques A Vidrine / NTT/Verio
nectar at celabo.org / jvidrine at verio.net / nectar at freebsd.org