portmaster: print /usr/ports/UPDATING on update

[Alex Stangl]

On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 12:16:05PM +0100, David Demelier wrote:
> A lot of people always forget to read UPDATING (that's normal we'll are 
> humans).
> 
> Each entry in UPDATING is like "AFFECTS: users of net-mgmt/flowd" so if 
> an update of net-mgmt/flowd is available and a *recent* entry in 
> UPDATING talks about then print the message.
> 
> This can prevent a lot of breakage and useless noise on lists. What do 
> you think ?

That's essentially what ports-mgmt/portupdate-scan tries to do. The
problem is that UPDATING was intended to be a human-readable file so
there is no consistent usage of the AFFECTS: line patterns. You have
deal with AFFECTS lines that you cannot machine-parse. You have to deal
with moved ports, different wildcard naming conventions, and other forms
of ambiguity. portupdate-scan uses Perl regex to try to cope with this,
but doesn't do a perfect job.

Unless the format of UPDATING gets tightened up to allow it to be better
understood by machine, I'm not sure it's worth bloating portmaster with
this functionality since it won't be able to do a perfect job of it. It
could result in list noise about false positives and false negatives in
this area.

Merry Christmas,

Alex