On Fri, 25 May 2001 mcmahill@mtl.mit.edu wrote:
> On Fri, 25 May 2001, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> >
> > 2) in order to _use_ those packages, you practically have to throw
> > away your CD, and blow away all your existing packages to upgrade
> > anything. What we should be doing, instead, is building to a
> > consistent baseline. Then, if do a "make package" in news/knews, and
> > upload all the packages produced, it should work as well for anyone
> > else as it does for me. The fly in the ointment is when we make
> > changes to dependencies without bumping the version numbers, so that
> > you have _completely_ _different_ packages with the same version
> > number floating around.
>
> i am now of the belief that we should only upload binary pkgs which were
> built against the tagged pkgsrc for each release for this reason.

Still not good enough, if you allow changes in the structure of the
package (DEPENDS) without a corresponding version bump. Consider,
we've resolved to keep 1.5 and 1.5.1 packages mingled. It's also
possible that people have built packages of their own, that they'd
like to reuse, maybe even built against previous versions of NetBSD.

Allowing only tagged packages is a cop out. It solves the problem of
incompatible binary packages in a trivial way -- the version you want
won't be there, so you'll have to build your own. It also sends a
message to folks who are trying to maintain their own collections, for
re-use, or use on multiple machines, that you can't do that, you must
instead blow away all your packages and rebuild them periodically.


Frederick