portmaster -s text (Was: Re: HEADS-UP: Shared Library Versions bumped)

[Doug Barton]

On Thu, 23 Jul 2009, Ben Morrow wrote:

> The problem with that is if you install pkg A deliberately, but it then
> later becomes a dependancy of pkg B. If you remove pkg B (because it's
> no longer needed) there is then no evidence that pkg A was installed on
> purpose, rather than incidentally. portmaster -s will offer to remove
> it, and if you refuse it will offer to remove the empty +REQUIRED_BY,
> effectively promoting it to a 'manually installed' pkg again, though
> it's perhaps not entirely clear from the question that that is what the
> effect will be.

Thanks for pointing this out. Can you suggest an alternative message? 
Other than the mundane reason the current message says what it does 
because I sometimes prefer to leave the empty file there so that when I go 
back through at a later date I can re-evaluate the choice.

> This would be easy to solve in general by maintaining a 'world' package,
> or some such, that had dependencies on everything installed explicitly;
> but that would require modifying all the pkg and port installation tools
> (probably including bsd.port.mk itself) to support that convention.

This sort of mechanism has been suggested before, but the problem you 
described (ports installed "on purpose" becoming a dependency of something 
else) is not an easy one to solve.

Doug

-- 

     This .signature sanitized for your protection