svn & new pkg system

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Sun, 10 Mar 2013 13:39:50 -0400, Fbsd8 <fbsd8 at a1poweruser.com> wrote:
> Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:
>> On Sun, 10 Mar 2013 13:18:04 -0400
>> Fbsd8 <fbsd8 at a1poweruser.com> wrote:
>>
>>> No body has made a case for NOT including svn in the base system. If
>>> it can be a port there is no reason why it can not be included in the
>>> base system.
>>
>> Giorgos did when he said "Subversion is a large system, with a ton of
>> dependencies" which translates to a lot of work to keep it up to date
>> in the base system, and all sorts of fun and games when other things
>> using those dependencies need a newer version.
>
> And how is that any different from any other package or pkgng situation.

Imagine what happens when library libfoo is a dependency of subversion,
and they are both imported into the base system.  At the same time there
are 2-3 incompatible versions of libfoo in the ports.

When libfoo is part of the base system we have to:

  a) Make sure that it works for the base system version of subversion.

  b) Other programs from ports do not accidentally link with the wrong
  version of the library from base.

  c) All programs that subversion uses (possibly plugins and extensions
     that are now part of base, but part of the packages) use the right
     'mix' of libraries.

This gets fairly complicated and a brittle _very_ very fast.

On the other hand, the inconvenience of having to install subversion
from ports is offset by the fact that _everything_ it depends on and
everything that depends on _subversion_ itself, is now handled in an
homogeneous manner, with exactly the same amount of effort that we would
have to spend anyway to maintain it in the ports.