Re: Problems with old "p5" packages and new "perl5" package

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:35:33 +0200 (CEST)
    From:        Havard Eidnes <he%NetBSD.org@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <20081016.203533.163778103.he%uninett.no@localhost>

  | 1) If one follows the normal
  |    pkgsrc dependency rules, as is done by "make update" or the
  |    traditional or new pkgsrc bulk builds, when a package a given
  |    package depends on has been updated, you need to rebuild the
  |    package in question too.

I'm not sure if make update does that or not (given that binary
packages exist, I consider it a disaster, and won't go near it).

But what you're suggesting would mean that every time some trivial
revision happens to one of the "used everywhere" low level packages
that just about everything would need to be recompiled - for no
good reason, but "just because".   That's absurd.   If there is a
new libpng I just compile and install it, the hundreds of other
packages that use -lpng don't care, don't need to know, and certainly
don't need to be recompiled, almost ever.

Occasionally a package will break binary compability with its callers,
requiring other stuff to all be recompiled (as now with the perl
upgrade) - pkgsrc does not yet have any good way to indicate that
(if it did, when you built the new perl, you could have just had
it say - ABI comcompatible with perl<5.10 and then all packages that
were built againsg 5.8.* (or anything else like that) would become
incompatible, and require rebuilding without any more work.

For now this all has to be done (semi-)manually.

kre

ps: see PR 39731 for exactly how the perl upgrade caused a real problem.