Portmaster with package support ready for beta testing

[Miroslav Lachman]

Michel Talon wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 12:05:45PM +0100, Miroslav Lachman wrote:

[...]

> 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.

There are more than one scenario why people may use packages.
I am sure many people are using portmaster or portupgrade with auto 
creation of packages for backup purpose - if I install newer version I 
need a backup of old package with dependencies for the case where newer 
version doesn't work well and needs to be rolled back.

Similar to when I have more machines and want few of them used as 
building and testing environment, then deploy packages to production 
machines.

So the extended metadata for packages will be useful for staff, 
debuging, recovery etc.

I am fine with source upgrade for this moment, but source upgrade causes 
long downtime of services in some cases - longer than upgrade based on 
packages. And as number of maintained servers grows it will becomes more 
important.

This is why I am interrested in better support of custom built packages 
for easier upgrade and I am not saying anything bad on current state of 
packages support in portmaster. It is definitely step forward.

Miroslav Lachman