portmaster and BROKEN ports

[Daniel Roethlisberger]

Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org> 2008-03-26:
> Willy Picard wrote:
> >portupgrade simply ignores BROKEN ports during a "portupgrade -a". I
> >am not even asking about a similar behaviour for portmaster. I wanted
> >just to ask if an option allows to do the same. If no such an option
> >exists, I think that its addition to the functionality of portmaster
> >may be worth considering.
> 
> I think it's important for users to know when their ports go into a
> BROKEN state, so ignoring them is not an option. If a user actually
> wants to ignore a port that is BROKEN, the +IGNOREME mechanism is
> available, as you pointed out.

Of course the user wants to be notified of all ports which cannot be
upgraded for some reason (broken, marked BROKEN, removed/missing origin,
etc.), but forcing the upgrade to abort because of a problem with a
single port does not make sense.  It means that portmaster can only be
run successfully if all the installed ports are in a 100% upgradable
state, which in my experience is basically almost never, except on
production servers with only a few well-maintained ports installed.

To keep a box current with portmaster, I have to manually mark each of
the non-upgradable ports with +IGNOREME files after portmaster bails
out, and restart portmaster.  I will then have to periodically check
back manually whether the problems went away in the meantime.  This is
unacceptable for me; too much manual intervention.

I would very much prefer to have an option that tells portmaster to skip
non-upgradable ports and those that depend on them, and notify me in
form of a concise, greppable list after the portmaster run.

This is actually the number one reason I switched back to portupgrade.
Other than that, portmaster would be the tool of my choice.

-Dan

-- 
Daniel Roethlisberger <daniel at roe.ch>