discussion of other ports-related projects

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 1:18 PM +0800 4/13/04, Erich Dollansky wrote:
>
>Kris Kennaway wrote:
>>On Tue, Apr 13, 2004, Erich Dollansky wrote:
>>
>>>It would be real helpfull to users if the package or port
>>>system would be able to automatically overcome this problem
>>>with installing the needed version in a way that the
>>>installed versions stays intact.
>>
>>
>>Take a look at the portupgrade port, I think that's what
>>you're trying to describe.
>
>
>If I understood portupgrade right, ...

Please note that this thread is not about portupgrade, or
successors to portupgrade.

The points you make are interesting, but please make them in a
separate thread.

>>>This could lead to a general system where any number of
>>>different versions of a package or port could be installed
>>>on the machine without any interferance.
>>
>>That's a very different problem.
>
>But it is what I meant.

When he said "very different problem", Kris was just trying to
help me out.  I wanted my original thread to discuss *my* project,
the project I am actively working on.  You have brought up some
reasonable issues, of course, but they are not related to the
proposed pkg-data project.  So if you want to discuss some other
project(s), then please just change the subject-line on your
message.   (and please drop me from the CC: list)

Fwiw, I think Matt Dillon is hoping to address the problem that
you are interested in.  He is doing it as part of DragonflyBSD,
but he feels he first needs to make some changes to the
base-system which will then make it easier to install multiple
versions of any given port (or set of ports).  This is another
large project to tackle in its own right, if it is to be
"done Right(tm)".

But my pkg-data ideas will do nothing to address those issues,
and I do not expect to try to address them.  My goal is to keep
the pkg-data project "as small as possible", just so there is
some chance that I might actually finish it.  *Any* change to
the entire ports-collection is a lot of work, so I want to avoid
starting on a project that will end up being too large to finish.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu