Portmaster with package support ready for beta testing

[Michel Talon]

On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 12:05:45PM +0100, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> 
> Does it mean that one needs ports tree or provide custom INDEX in case 
> of custom packages with non default options (different dependencies) to 
> compute order od dependencies?
> (AFAIK plain pkg_add works without ports tree and INDEX, that's why I am 
> asking)

This is because a package contains a list of requirements. However
problems may appear, for example if requirements have changed between
the installation of the ports you have on your machine and the moment 
when the package has been compiled. Moreover some ports compile
different stuff according to what is present on your machine. The
configure script may autodetect stuff like gnome, etc. and automatically
compile for example a gnome version of the program.
For all these reasons there may be divergences between the dependencies
as seen on your machine and the ones recorded in the package which has
been compiled elsewhere.

> 
> It is related to my idea of extending packages with more metadata, for 
> example OS version + arch, used build options (WITH_ / WITHOUT_ etc.) so 
> one can easily determine "how this package was built". But it seems as 
> not so easy task to me, as I don't know how to get all the options (from 
> /etc/make.conf, environment variables, /var/db/ports, commandline...) 
> and record them to file in useful way.
> It can be useful in case where I have some backup of packages from many 
> machines, but have not the original environment, where packages were 
> built etc.

For the above reasons i think that using precompiled packages should be
restricted to people who don't mess with the standard settings. When you
install some Debian packages you take them as is, and things generally
work because mostly everybody use the same packages which are well
tested and coherent. If, on your machine, you want to use a specially
configured program, you download the sources and compile it. But you
take care yourself of the upgrades of this program. I think that a
similar behaviour should be viable on FreeBSD. If you extensively
modify the configuration of a large number of ports, you cannot expect 
a packages-based upgrade to work. In this case the only reasonable way
is to upgrade from source.


> 
> Miroslav Lachman

-- 

Michel TALON