> Recently many packages have been renamed so that they match the upstream
> name.  This is good for the long term, but causes considerable grief in
> updating.  I'll use (GConf2)devel/GConf2 -> (Gconf)devel/GConf as an
> example.
>
> Specifically:
>
> 1) make replace fails for renamed packages.  This is perhaps not so hard
> to fix; it will need to take an explicit "old package" name from which
> to save dependencies and to delete, so that we can do
>
>   make replace OLDPKGNAME=Gconf2
>
> This is complicated by the fact that multiple renames will happen over
> time.  I am only trying to handle the most recent rename, and renames
> really should be rare - if we are renaming any particular package more
> than once every two years something is seriously wrong.  For example,
> the current gnome rename binge is due to the gnome1->2 transition, and
> that was a long long time ago.  So automatically handling only the most
> recent rename seems fine, with human intervention required for harder
> cases.
>
> So, I propose the following text file
>
> RENAMEDATE OLDNAME OLDPATH NEWNAME NEWPATH
>
> with date in YYYYMMDD, *NAME being PKGNAME (no version) and *PATH being
> PKG_PATH (e.g. "devel/GConf", no quotes).  Entries are required to be
> sorted, and usage would use the latest matching one.  We can maybe
> remove entries older than 2 years - doing a piecewise update for more
> than that is really hard - 1 year is merely painful, although this would
> fix a lot.
>
> I don't think we can get this from doc/CHANGES in a reasonable way.
>
> Perhaps this can be doc/RENAMES.
>
> Do people think this would work?  Comments?  Objections?
>
> I've been talking about this for a long time, but I think it will be
> easier to implement this than struggle with gome updates on multiple
> systems.


Maybe each pkg should get a unique PKGID so that pkgsrc would actually
be attempting to update pkgid=2574FFA instead of pkg=gconf2.