On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 11:18:15PM +0700, Robert Elz wrote: [...] > Was there anything in my message that you actually disagree with? > (other than the first point in your reply and this message of course.) I might have disagreed with some stuff in your mail but I've tried reading it to the end twice, and woke up with my neck in a painful angle the two times. To sum up, I think your point is that no package in pkgsrc properly describe the versions it needs from its dependency. This is true, but then it is completely impossible to have that. Sure, a package can "know" to some extent what past versions of a package it can work with, but there is no way it can accurately know about future versions. The points you're missing, I think, are first that it is not exactly what we need to make pkgsrc works better. Close, but not quite. The second point is that this issue shows up in partial upgrades, which are hard to get right, and as a matter of fact I think only pkgsrc (and maybe FreeBSD's and OpenBSD's ports to some extent) try to do that. Binary package systems only have to care about ABI, and this is much easier to do with only binaries given a proper update tool. What pkgsrc lacks at this point, is build information embedded in binary packages (or rather, installed packages, which is essentially the same). When you update or build from the pkgsrc tree a package that depends on another package already installed, it should use information embedded in the installed pacakge to build. But that is also very hard to do. That said, I'd rather see pkgsrc developers work more on providing a better experience for binary packages users (or, as I am sure some would say, *an* experience in the first place) than making partial upgrades work better. Not that it stops me from ranting about the latter every now and then, because short of having a binary package repository, and not willing to update packages all the time, partial upgrades are still what works best. Hey, reader, wake up! No, don't complain, subscription to this list doesn't come with a masseuse. -- Quentin Garnier - cube%cubidou.net@localhost - cube%NetBSD.org@localhost "See the look on my face from staying too long in one place [...] every time the morning breaks I know I'm closer to falling" KT Tunstall, Saving My Face, Drastic Fantastic, 2007.
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