Utility for safe updating of ports in base system

[RW]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 20:43:51 -0700
Garrett Cooper <youshi10 at u.washington.edu> wrote:

> RW wrote:
> > On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 14:31:39 -0400
> > Adam Stroud <adam.p.stroud at baesystems.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >> I was just on the FreeBSD "list of projects and ideas fot
> >> volunteers" page and I was wondering if anyone was working on the
> >> "portupgrade in C" utility.  I would be willing to help
> >> (code/document/test) if it's needed.
> > 
> > What would be the point of putting any port-upgrading tool in the
> > base-system? The ports tree isn't branched, so why branch such
> > tools in the base-system. IMO they logically belong in ports where
> > they are better able to follow any developments in the
> > ports-system. 
> 
> I'm working on combining the pkg_* tools along with the existing 
> makefile system with a bourne shell file for my SoC project(*)
> 
> As for writing a utility in C, why? Almost everything's there right
> now and just needs to be strung together with some clever scripting
> to make it all work. C in this case is just overkill IMO.
> 
> I'm sorry RW, because while I do agree to some extent, there should
> be something out of the box that works with the Makefiles and does 
> everything necessary to install ports, apart from someone manually
> going to each directory and typing in "make install", or using some
> "advanced" functionality in the Makefiles.

You "make install"  (or pkg_add) once to build your preferred tool.
If that's too much trouble, sysinstall might add the package as part of
a standard profile - it does this with xorg. Or it could add the
package when it asks you if you want the ports tree. This is not a
serious argument for putting something in the base-system. 

If you put a build tool in the base-system then sooner or later someone
will need a newer version, which means having a port too and flags to
say which is the preferred version. This will lead to needless
confusion. And since few people will want to upgrade their up-to-date
ports with an out-of-date tool, I suspect that most people will go for
the ports version anyway.

I've yet to hear a single cogent argument for this.