Call for feedback on a Ports-collection change

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 9:20 PM -0800 1/8/04, Brooks Davis wrote:
>On Fri, Jan 09, 2004, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>  > Inside the proposed pkg-data file, the patches can have
>>  whatever names you want.  (That was already part of my
>>  plan). For instance, you could name each patch for the
>>  exact filename it modifies (if you wanted to) -- including
>>  directory names and using '/'s as separators.  It's just
>>  that when the program spits them out, it'll do it into
>>  boring-named files.  That was my thought, at least, I'm
>>  certainly willing to spit them out with other names.
>
>What I'd really like to see from you is, what does the port
>maintanence cycle look like to the port maintainer and how
>is it different from today.  I can think of different ways
>it would work, but I want to know how you see it happening.

Basically, I don't have a finalized idea on that.  That's
the kind of feedback that I need from developers who are
more experienced with ports than I am.

 From other comments in this thread, I'm thinking that maybe
I need some kind of "export" and "import" option on the
simple-program for managing the pkg-data file.  So (maybe)
you would:

    1) run:  pdatamgr export patches
       which would create a directory that has all
       the patches in the present patch file.
    2) make whatever changes you want to make.
    3) run:  pdatamgr import patches
       and the program pulls those patches into
       the pkg-data file.
    4) run: cvs commit pkg-data

but really, I'm open to other ideas.  This project has plenty
of work to keep me busy before I need to write that code.

>One thing I like about the idea of stuffing the patches into
>some sort of single file is that it would actually reduce the
>amount of information I have to put in PRs since path addition
>and removal would just happen.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu