Problems with portupgrade && xscreensaver-gnome
Bill Moran
wmoran at potentialtech.com
Thu Jul 31 12:16:31 UTC 2008
In response to Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org>:
> Bill Moran wrote:
> > It's a combination of a number of issues:
> > 1) The ports infrastructure shouldn't let you set options that don't make
> > sense.
>
> I think that one could argue that it should be _hard_ to set options
> that "don't make sense," but I don't think it should be impossible. you
> have to keep in mind that we cater to a very diverse user community,
> from rank beginners to advanced hackers.
True. My opinion: A GUI that _prevents_ novice users from selecting
incompatible options is a good idea. Expert users can always manually
tweak /var/db/ports/ files if they want to override those restrictions.
> > 2) Why is portupgrade dying on a warning message? Why does a poor
> > decision on one port prevent everything on my system from upgrading?
>
> For the same reason that portmaster dies on errors, neither program is
> omniscient. :) If ports tools hit a point where it's not clear how to
> proceed they _should_ stop and get user input. The next thing the users
> generally say is that it should "somehow" proceed with the rest of the
> upgrade, finish things that don't rely on the broken bits, etc.
> Unfortunately that is quite a bit harder to do than you might think,
> although patches are always welcome.
Understood. But keep in mind that this was not an error, it was a
warning. Perhaps the ports infrastructure doesn't differentiate between
those two as much as I think.
> > 3) The error from portupgrade does not immediately point me to the easy
> > solution, it tricks me into thinking I have to hack the Makefile.
>
> I don't actually think that the error message you're referring to is
> from portupgrade, I think it's from the port itself.
I can see that.
--
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com
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