Too frequent/poorly tested bsd.port.mk commits, and general uselessness of p5-FreeBSD-Portindex
Doug Barton
dougb at dougbarton.us
Thu Dec 26 07:30:44 UTC 2013
I have used Matthew's p5-FreeBSD-Portindex for several years. In the
past it was a very valuable tool that allowed me to keep an INDEX up to
date relative to changes in the ports tree in seconds or minutes,
instead of having to do 'make index' every time. However the utility of
the solution is dependent on a couple of things, including that
bsd.port.mk does not change often.
Over the last year or so however the changes to bsd.port.mk, which used
to be well tested and batched together, are now coming fast and furious.
To make matters worse, the commits are often poorly tested, which leads
to several commits related to the same issue in one week. Obviously
that's bad for the project generally, but I'm more concerned about
whether or not it's going to be useful to stick with
p5-FreeBSD-Portindex going forward.
Speaking of p5-FreeBSD-Portindex generally, I'm wondering what Matthew's
plans are for it? For some time now running 'cache-update -f
svn-up,options' has caused errors related to "WARNING unknown options
file" that seem to have to do with the recent changes to the
/var/db/ports/<category>_<portname> convention. Is an update planned to
handle this? Also, I just tried running cache-init with bdb 5, which
seemed to succeed, but running portindex generated a lot of suspicious
errors. I'll try again after reinstalling bdb 4.7, but I'm wondering if
this is a known issue.
Doug
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