I wish I had a make target that...

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

I gave up on "make update" in pkgsrc - it never does what I want and when
it fails (i.e. most of the time) it leaves me in an unrecoverable state.

What I would like to have is a target, let's call it "overwrite", that just
blindly tells the pkg to install all its files (like "make install" would
do), but not change any state - neither in $PKGOBJ, /var/db/pkg/* nor
in the binary pkg repository.

How to use it?

   make
   (fix build bugs)
   make overwrite
   test, find runtime bugs, fix them (in pkgobj)
   remove work/.build_done
   make
   make overwrite
   test....

When all is well, instead of "make overwrite" create patches, clean up
and do a "make install" (testing all patches from scratch) and continue
with the next pkg. Of course this needs to also work when the package
is already installed and has other pkgs alread depend on it.

Is this a bogus idea? Is there something similar already?

Martin