Thomas Klausner <wiz@NetBSD.org> writes:

> On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 09:15:22PM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> > I'd like there to be support for a number of variables/properties of
> > packages, or rather specifically a variable that indicates a (direct)
> > dependency has been 'make replace'd (and hence the package is "dirty"
> > and needs rebuilding).  I think that the the 'foo property is true'
> > feature should be abstracted.  We shouldn't add these with abandon,
> > but among the standard CS choices of 0, 1, and many it seems the
> > answer is many.
> > 
> > So perhaps the use of -A as a flag is not the best choice, compared to
> > something like -Dautomatic=yes (don't care about the syntax, realize
> > -D is probably taken, but using the name rather than a magic token, to
> > stay similar to pkg_info and pkg_admin usage).
> 
> I'm not sure why pkg_add would need support for the feature you
> propose, and in the patch pkg_admin already has an extensible
> interface (pkg_admin set) with which support for this could be added
> easily.

I'm not sure why pkg_add would need it either, due to the semantics,
but in the general case of property/value pairs it could be desired to
set some at pkg_add time.  But if pkg_admin set is general already,
that's probably entirely adequate.

(My vision is to be able to find the set of pacakges which are out of
date or dirty, find the earliest one in the tsorted entire list, and
make replace it, causing any depending packages to be marked dirty.
Then repeat.  This will bring everything up to date, with some
inconsistency due to ABI changes along the way, but end up in a safe
state.  Such a scheme could be an alternative to 'make update',
swapping dirty for not installed as the intermediate problem.)

-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>