pkgng - Symlinks created by portupgrade?

[Walter Hurry]

On Fri, 11 Jan 2013 15:50:56 +0000, Matthew Seaman wrote:

> On 11/01/2013 15:18, Walter Hurry wrote:
>> On Thu, 10 Jan 2013 01:50:34 +0000, Walter Hurry wrote:
>> 
>>> Thank you yet again, Matthew. As always, you are a fount of knowledge.
>>>
>>> The guidance on LATEST_LINK has helped a great deal. I still have a
>>> further question or two though; I shall follow up within a day or two.
>> 
>> Just one further question: Is there a reason why 'pkg create' doesn't
>> generate synonyms this way, even when the output directory is set to
>> /usr/
>> ports/packages/All?
> 
> Yes. 'pkg create' may be used to create arbitrary packages outside the
> context of ports, so it doesn't want to assume the LATEST_LINK layout.
> (All you need is an appropriate MANIFEST file... or a previously
> installed package on your system.)
> 
> Like I said, for the purpose of generating a pkgng repo, this whole
> question of directory structure is pretty much immaterial: pkgng doesn't
> care.  Any sort of directory structure containing .txz package tarballs
> will do. (Usually putting all the pkgs together in one big directory is
> what happens.)
> 
> The LATEST_LINK layout is aimed at people logging into a ftp server and
> hunting through the directory tree for the packages they want.  Most
> pkgng repos won't let you login like that, nor will all of them
> necessarily let you get a directory listing, other than the data you can
> extract from repo.sqlite.
> 
> As for special casing things when writing to ${PORTSDIR}/packages/All --
> no one has seen fit to write the code to do that.  If you think this
> sort of functionality would be useful, well, we always like to get pull
> requests.  I would point out though that there is already perfectly good
> code in bsd.port.mk et al to do this sort of thing, which you can access
> by 'make package'.
> 
Thanks for the comprehensive explanation, Matthew. It's no big deal; I 
was just curious. Yes, I was aware that pkg repo ignores symlinks - it 
says so in 'man pkg-repo'.