binary patches?

[Gabor Kovesdan]

Gary Kline schrieb:
> 	Regarding most (or many) of the port changes--say, upgrading
> 	foo-2.1.9_5 to foo-2.1.9_6, if  the upgrade could be done by
> 	downloading a binary diff file, could the resulting
> 	/usr/local/bin/foo-2.1.9_6 be achieved by downloading a 
> 	relatively small binary patch?  Seems to me that smaller scale
> 	upgrades could be done this way in preference to re-compiling
> 	ports or downloading entire pacakes.  --Same would go for any
> 	dependencies.
>
> 	Why is this a bad idea!
>
> 	gary
>   
The final form of actual binaries depend on a lot of things, e.g. which 
version of dependency you compiled with, which CFLAGS you have used, 
what options the port you built it. Some of these applies to packages as 
well, that's why I prefer ports over packages at all. E.g. let's see 
lang/php5. It does not have the apache module enabled by default. If it 
were, then the problem comes up with Apache versions. IIRC, 2.2 is the 
default now, but what if you use 2.0? How would you install php for your 
apache version from package? The situtation has been already pretty 
complicated with packages if you have higher needs for fine tuning, but 
you can use them if you don't have special needs. Binary diffs would be 
so complicated that I think this way we could really not follow.

If you need simplicity at all, use portupgrade with packages. It has an 
option (don't remember which one) you can use to make it fetch packages 
instead of building from source. Nowadays, this network traffic should 
not be a real problem, I think.

Regards,
Gabor