Upgrading to 7.0 - stupid requirements

[Anders Nordby]

Hi,

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 09:28:35PM +0100, Oliver Fromme wrote:
>> If this thing can be solved (I'm not programmer so I don't know) I can
>> donate some amount of $ for development. I think that this would make
>> lots of people happy.
> I have to admit I see no way how the problem could
> be solved in a different way, I'm afraid.

By FreeBSD adpoting some variant of apt-get for ports maybe? And by
making the ports install configuration files in such a way that
upgrading is more easy?gThe way it is now, you typically have to move
away old config files during/before an upgrade, and manually merge with
the new default of whichever program you are upgrading so that you get
new defaults. A good example is the way Debian installs Apache I guess,
with a directory structure like this under /etc/apache2:

conf.d (custom configuration)

sites-available (virtualhost configuration)

sites-enabled (symlinks for enabled virtualhosts)

mods-available (available Apache modles)

mods-enabled (symlinks for enabled Apache modules)

Of course, this would be a huge task to undertake. But why aren't we
doing it already? IMO the biggest problems with ports today is the lack
of an easy to use, powerful binary (!) upgrade system which can do
upgrades more efficiently for most uses/users.

PS: Your description of how to upgrade your ports matches with what I do
after a major OS upgrade (delete all, then reinstall). For sure it
works. But it isn't really efficient. Don't you agree? By not having an
efficient upgrade prodcedure, you typically end up not getting software
updates done as often as you might like. At least that is how it is for
me.

Cheers,

-- 
Anders.