Re: Preserving binary packages

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2014-11-10 at 01:46 GMT, Alistair Crooks wrote:

> Am I missing something in the bigger picture, though?  Why should we
> not preserve/create binary packages?  The advent of binary package
> managers require a package as a basic unit of transfer, and it makes
> much sense to me to build binary packages all the time.

I actually prefer the current behaviour.  I do a lot of development on
packages where $PACKAGES is set to the same location as the bulk
builds, and I do not want to overwrite a bulk build package when
building manually.  Yes, I could switch $PACKAGES or so to avoid this
or use some non-standard target, but I like the nomenclature of
'install' to install and 'package' to package - it makes more sense to
me.

Once 'install' is clean I can push changes and have the bulk build
generate a new package.  If 'install' had generated a $PACKAGES
package, the bulk build code would not have rebuilt the package as it
would already exist, and I'd have lost any additional bulk build tests
(building unpriv, clean chroot, etc).

However I do see the need to preserve the old behaviour that you and
others rely on.  I'd suggest the variable be named a bit clearer,
something like PKGSRC_INSTALL_SAVES_PACKAGE=yes|no.

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com