hello all,

2 short questions about package management with 
the NetBSD pkg_* tools:

[1] What is the difference between using pkg_delete(1) to 
    delete a package, and cd'ing into the package source
    directory and doing a 'make deinstall'?

    Do these two commands do the same thing?  If not, 
    how are they different?  I've read the man pages for 
    the pkg_* utilities, and "Packages.txt", but it is 
    not that clear to me that these are doing different 
    things...?

[2] Is there a way to "retract" or "reverse" a package?

    Here is what I mean:  suppose I install a package
    called 'foo-1.0'.  All right, after some time, I then 
    install 'foo-1.1'.  When I do, all kinds of things break,
    and now what I want to do is reverse back to what the 
    system looked like before I installed foo-1.1.  (In DUX-speak,
    this is "reversing a patch.")   

    With the current set of package tools, is there a way to do 
    this?  I can see that I can do a 

	pkg_delete foo-1.1
	pkg_install foo-1.0

    Does this sequence guarantee that the system looks just the 
    way it did before I upgraded to foo-1.1?  "Guarantee" seems
    like a strong word; in the software world nothing is guaranteed :-)
    So let's just say "Does this sequence make it highly likely
    that the system looks as it did before the foo-1.1 upgrade?"

    What I'd like is (in effect) the ability to snapshot the entire
    system between package changes, so that I can always retreat
    to the last safe (sane, working) snapshot.  Is this something
    a package management system should do?  Or is this really just
    a question of keeping good backups (always a good idea, anyway!)
    and then restoring the system to the last sane state?

[3] (Remember, there are three kinds of computer scientists: those
    who can count, and those who can't.)

    What (by the way) is the difference between

	pkg_add foo-1.0		and 	cd /usr/pkgsrc/*/foo-1.0
					make ; make install

    and
	pkg_delete foo-1.0	and 	cd /usr/pkgsrc/*/foo-1.0
					make deinstall

    ??

Thanks for your help,

	lou

--
Monkey 346:  I thought "Unicode" was supposed to be readable by *every* OS.
Monkey 347:  It is.
Monkey 346:  So how come my test program just prints random garbage 
             when I try to read an NTFS file?            
Monkey 347:  Uhhhh.... Garbage In, Garbage Out?

	-- from "The Adventures of Code Monkey #347"