the art of pkgdb -F

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 27/03/07, Jonathan Horne <freebsd at dfwlp.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:17:13 -0400
> "Michael P. Soulier" <msoulier at digitaltorque.ca> wrote:
>
> > I'm looking at
> >
> > http://www.freebsddiary.org/pkgdb.php
> >
> > while I run it myself. I'm finding wonderful questions like
> >
> > Stale dependency: p5-Authen-SASL-2.09 -> p5-GSSAPI-0.24 (security/p5-GSSAPI):
> > p5-Geography-Countries-1.4 (score:26%) ? ([y]es/[n]o/[a]ll) [no]
> >
> > I must ask. How the hell am I supposed to know?? I build that as a dependency
> > of something that I built months ago. There's a good chance that I'll be
> > simply guessing at all of the answers.
> >
> > Is it really useful to run this if you can't remember? And why am I
> > remembering anyway? That's what a packaging system is for, isn't it?

>
> when i come across those, i always just take the defaults.
> one time i tried to tell it what i thought, and i built myself
> into an endless loop of 'run pkgdb -F's.  eventually i had
> to just delete a few things, reinstall a few things to correct
> it.  ever since then, i just do what it says and hope for the
> best.  9 out of 10, it guesses right for me.
>

Not to put too fine a point on it, but
pkgdb(1) et al are part of an ((((occasionally
tempermental)))) third party package
management system.  Built on ruby.

Obviously, as I am not about to batter you
about the neck and head with the beam projecting
from my eye (hold still, you've got a . . .),
I can only suggest a decent cringe&pray
manouver (as I execute from time to time),
and a stout attempt to wean oneself off,
albeit
% portupgrade -fr blorf*
is quite seductive, nearly doubly so when
blorf* is actually gettext.arg.bah.

ports-mgmt/portmaster disposes with the
hairy databases and leering dependancies
at the cost of being slightly less . . . err, come
to think of it, after a bit of man page perusal
I cannot think of anything that I use portupgrade
for that portmaster seems to be missing.  YMMV
as usual.

Well, portmaster seems to have rather different
notions of how flags apply than do I (it seems to
enjoy recusring through dependancies when I was
nearly certain I did not set that flag, several times)
but with training my computer is teaching me what
is right and what is not.  I think.

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