On Fri, 23 Jan 2004, John Goerzen wrote:

> Even better: why even deinstall at all.  Why not install the new
> version, then delete any files/dirs that the old version provided that
> were not present in the new one?

I provided some patches to pkg_add (and man page) that added a new option
for overwriting a package and cleaning up any left over files. It also
added an upgrade option to the install/deinstall scripts (to be used as
needed). This has worked great for me (because I need to be able to
overwrite coreutils or other required software without deleting first).

Then later, I suggested same should be done for pkgsrc too.

As mentioned in another reply to your thread, one problem is other
software that may depend on specific versions of shared libraries. Another
issue is that other software may depend on a specific version of another
tool (but as of now is not registered to show a precise need).

I suggested that packages can dynamically generate the actual sonames (for
libraries)  that are used and make them requirements for dependencies.
Also, other filenames (and more specific dependency versioning) could be
manually added as needed.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/