The future of portmaster [and of ports-mgmt/synth]

[Kevin Oberman]

On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 2:53 PM, Mark Linimon <linimon at lonesome.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 11:46:46PM +0200, Per olof Ljungmark wrote:
> > Hello, I have not followed this thread before but just wanted to say
> > that I use portmaster extensively, it works for us and I would miss
> > it if it went.  Are there actually plans to retire it?
>
> To reiterate the status:
>
>  * some extensive changes to the ports framework are coming;
>  * these will require large changes to all the port upgrade tools;
>  * no one has stepped forwards to offer to do the work for anything
>    other than poudriere AFAIK.
>
> If no one does the work, at the time the large changes come, the
> other tools will break.
>
> People have been wanting subpackages (aka flavors) for many years;
> IIUC these are parts of the changes that are coming.
>
> Someone needs to step forwards and say "yes, I will do the work."
>
> mcl


Since portmaster is still popult and since the only solutions that looks to
be available in the near term are pouderiere or raw make, neither terribly
viable for many, I will look into updating portmaster to deal with
'flavors'. This looks fairly straight forward and I my have the sh
capability to manage it. (And then again, I am far from a great shell
person, so I may well be wrong.) I have looked at Doug's script and it is
pretty readable, but writing may require help.

Can someone point me where to look for documentation on flavors? I have
poked around the wiki, but to no avail. Unless there is documentation on
what needs to be done, doing it will be hopeless and waiting for the
packaging system to updated means portmaster WILL be broken for some period
of time.
--
Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com
PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683