On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 10:07:20AM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
> It seems cool, but it can be quite painful in practice.  In my
> department we have a number of both NetBSD and FreeBSD machines.  Our
> sysadmin regularly updates each box along netbsd-1-6 or RELENG_4
> branches, and also keeps pkgs/ports up to date.  He has been using
> portupgrade.  My conclusion from observing all this as well as using
> portupgrade on my own box (I won't speak for him) is that portupgrade
> and FreeBSD ports is pretty scary to maintain, and that pkgsrc is far
> easier to deal with.  My own box has since been moved to NetBSD, and
> pkgsrc is one of the reasons.
> 
> Specific comments:

> 5. The basic operation of upgrading is somewhat like 'make replace',
>    except that (I'm fuzzy on the details) it keeps old .so versions
>    around to not break programs linked against them.  This is a very
>    cool feature.

How often in practice to libraries depend on other files? What if an old
library depends on certain old files being around, but the files were 
overwritten with newer versions?

I don't know if this tends to be a real problem or not.
-- 
Kevin P. Neal                                http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/

"Nonbelievers found it difficult to defend their position in \ 
    the presense of a working computer." -- a DEC Jensen paper