Subject: Re: difficulty from renaming packages, and how to deal
To: None <tech-pkg@NetBSD.org>
From: Alan Barrett <apb@cequrux.com>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 09/21/2007 19:44:04
On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Greg Troxel wrote:
> 1) Some upgrades can surprise people, and we should perhaps have a way
> to obtain consent from the admin.  apache 1.3 to 2 is certainly an
> example.

The new pkg could contain a variable telling pkg_add/make replace/make
install/etc to warn about updates from incompatible old versions.
(For "warn" read "refuse, unless a special command line option is
used".)  The variable's value would be some sort of package wildcard,
but I can't think of a good variable name.  We'd probably want to set
this whenever the user-edited config file format changes radically,
or whenever the data format for files used by the package changes
incompatibly, or whenever we have other reasons to suspect that users
will be inconvenienced by an automatic upgrade.

I have been hurt by upgrades from one version of postgresql to another
(where the correct procedure involves using the old version to dump or
export the database, and then using the new version to import the dump
file), and upgrades from one version of bacula to another (where the
documented procedure involved running some sort of script that wasn't
installed by pkgsrc, and didn't work correctly).  It would be nice not
to go through that without warning.

--apb (Alan Barrett)