using ports for things they were never meant to do

[Lowell Gilbert]

Julian Elischer <julian at freebsd.org> writes:

> So this seems to be  a speciality of mine.
>
> I often find that I need a ports tree at rev X except for some port
> foo/bar that needs to be at some different rev (Y) to pick up  a
> fix/change needed by the application. Now there is no reason that I
> can't just edit the distinfo file and the Makefile and replace X with
> Y, and that nearly always works if X and Y are not too different. I'd
> prefer however to be able to upgrade the Makefile to the right level,
> but that then hits the problem that he Makefile is using an API with
> the rest of the ports system, that is rapidly changing. SO you have
> much more chance of your build failing because of Makefile changes
> than due to incompatibilities in the distfiles.
>
> My personal way of handing that would be to break the pkg rev out to a
> separate file with nothing but PORTVERSION and PORTREVISION in it so
> that the version of the distfile being fetched is divorced from the
> ports API.  Then in my tree I update distinfo and the new Portrev and
> leave the Makefile alone.
>
> Does anyone else have a better way to slide a particular port back or
> ahead compared to the rest of the tree?

I find it easier to use sticky dates in Subversion...