Flaws in the ports system?

[Ion-Mihai Tetcu]

On Sat, 22 Oct 2005 00:56:42 -0500
Vulpes Velox <v.velox at vvelox.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 21 Oct 2005 01:19:20 +0200
> Benjamin Lutz <benlutz at datacomm.ch> wrote:
> 
> > nocturnal wrote:
> > > This is a very low priority discussion but i was just wondering
> > > if there are any known design flaws in the ports system or other
> > > reasons for the ports to be replaced by a new system.
> > 
> > They work well, more or less, and certainly as intended. There's a
> > couple of things though that I think are not solved optimally:

 [ Support for different versions of a software package. ... ]

> > - Configuration management. This is hard to get right, but I don't
> >   think that simply littering /usr/local/etc with .sample files is
> > the best way to solve it. I've seen some infrastructure in place to
> >   automagically merge config file changes, but I didn't notice it
> > being used so far. As it is, upgrading daemons means lots of manual
> > labour (scanning the sample config file for changes, or even
> > redoing the configuration from scratch), which every admin has to
> > do, and which could maybe be pooled so the port maintainer does
> > most of it, and the users could simply say y/n a few times in a
> > tool like mergemaster.
> 
> Interactive ports are insanely annoying. I honestly would love to see
> the crap like that done away with in most cases. After I finish a few

config-recursive for OPTIONS ports

> projects, I am actually planning on figuring out a way rework that
> in a lot nicer manner than most of the interactive stuff popping up
> the damn menu is currently done. When I have the time, I plan to
> solve this. What I want is this, a enviromental variable to tell it
> to use the defaults, if possible, and if not to skip it. Then a

BATCH=yes ? If any port which doesn't set INTERACTIVE doesn't obey it
then that port needs to be fixed.

> command to get a list of supported settings that that port uses.

*If* all interactive ports would be using OPTIONS show-config would be
enough (not counting vars that can be set by users like HOME_DIR=....)


-- 
IOnut
Unregistered ;) FreeBSD "user"
  "Intellectual Property" is   nowhere near as valuable   as "Intellect"