Upgrade suggestion

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 26/03/07, Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
> On Mar 26, 2007, at 4:40 PM, Gary Kline wrote:
> >
> >       Hi Folks,
> >
> >       Last night it struck me that one reason I constantly find new
> >       ports to upgrade is that with ~17K ports, if you're running one
> >       of the more common desktop managers and several popular apps,
> >       there are going to be at least a dozen minor tweaks every day.
>
> Possibly, for a very busy program with multiple authors actively
> making changes.  Normally, projects accumulate such changes and only
> release point version updates perhaps every month or so, and most
> have updates available much less often than that.
>
> >       E.g.:going from foo-1.6.7_2  to foo-1.6.7_3.
>
> Portrevision bumps commonly happen when an underlying dependency
> changes; you generally don't get any changes to foo itself, unless
> the program version itself changes.
>
> >         I used to run
> >       port[upgrade|manager] twice/week.  Was swamped; recently,
> >       upgrading things daily.   Since a lot of the wm ports take
> >       > 24 hours to build/re-build, I'm pretty much wedged.   Thus
> >       this suggestion  (for all port/package upgrade suites):
> >       have a flag, say 'u' for "urgent" when *foo*" goes from
> >       foo-1.6.7 to -1.6.8  or else when/if foo makes a critical
> >       fix.
>
> There's an easier way: you can probably wait to rebuild ports until
> you see something listed in portaudit's output, or you know you want
> to update something being actively used to a specific known version
> that you need.
>

Of course, Gentoo's portage system does all of this.
Of course, Gentoo's portage system is a complete
labyrinth of configuration files scattered over countless
myriads (10^4) of subdirectories so that running a mixture
of Holy-and-Blessed Versions and "testing" versions
becomes a lovely game of tag combined with memory and
$10,000 Pyramid, only fewer bleached-white teeth.

I think the addition of portaudit for such a huge (~17K ports!)
collection (and a much less strenuous upgrade cycle) is an
excellent idea.

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