On Thu, 16 Sep 1999, Rene Hexel wrote:

>   Hmm, IMHO there are several TODO's for the update target:
> 
>   * better support for resuming an interrupted 'make update'.  At
>     least, we should prevent the user from calling 'make update'
>     w/o REINSTALL=1 a second time (this should only work after a
>     'make clean'), and issue an apropriate warning.

Resuming an interrupted "make update" with REINSTALL= doesn't work in
every case. The problem seems to be that "make reinstall" doesn't
recheck dependencies.

This is what happened to me: I did a "make update" in ncurses. It
deleted ncurses, teTeX&c, and Lyx, builds ncurses, and so on. At some
point it fails because teTeX-bin/work is owned by root. So I set
REINSTALL=1 in /etc/mk.conf permanently, and "make update" again. It
installs "dialog" and says it's done! Now I'm gun-shy about doing a
"make update" as root, even with REINSTALL set, so I go to Lyx and
make reinstall, but it doesn't install teTeX-bin. (teTeX-share and
teTeX-sharesrc were left alone for some reason.) So I suspend
installation of Lyx while it's registering and reinstall teTeX-bin,
but forget to reinstall teTeX, so Lyx is now registered improperly.

I'm sure there's pilot error involved, but for "make update" to be
truly useful, it needs to be more idiot proof.
 
>   * A way of fetching files first, before running 'pkg_delete'.
>     This could either be done automatically (through a two-pass
>     mechanism) or through an 'update-fetch-list' target.

That would be good, and it should be simple enough to implement.