sysutils/cfs

[Matthias Andree]

Am 10.09.2011 16:08, schrieb perryh at pluto.rain.com:

> Last I knew, if port X uses services provided by port Y and port
> Y changes, port X often needs to be rebuilt and reinstalled even
> though nothing in port X has changed.  AFAIK this has nothing to
> do with backups.
> 
> If you've found a way to avoid ever having to rebuild, say, kdiff3
> when something changes in KDE, I'm sure the authors of portupgrade
> and portmaster would like to hear about it!  It would greatly
> simplify their job.

Interesting question that you pose.  In cases where only the so-called
SONAME of libraries in port Y changed, but not that part of the ABI that
port X used, chances are we might go without it for the majority of
ports, but that's not done currently.

However, the versioning of .so files and FreeBSD's linker isn't
currently up to such a task, so we might have to hack the executables
and libraries in port X to include the new SONAME, and wouldn't get
guarantees it actually worked.

On the other hand, you're pointing out a problem of dead ports in the
first place: if the API of (usually library) port Y changes, and port X
is unmaintained, that's typically a situation where port X needs to be
deprecated and removed (and also will no longer build and/or work).