pkg_chk replacement?

[joerg at britannica.bec.de]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 06:41:30PM +0000, Marcin Jessa wrote:
> First it deinstalls all the packages it wants to upgrade. If you're unlucky to
> have your wm and (X)term deinstalled and the term crashes during
> update you will not only lose your X session but also the entire list of
> packages you had on the system. I was lucky when this happened building
> package list first so I could restore the missing files.

Have you even read the man page of pkg_chk? You can just restart and it
will continue where it was left. Even plain make update keeps a list of
the pcakages it has to update.

> > Using inplace updates still breaks
> > the software for a certain window if successful, and can result in
> > silent breakage being detected much later. That's why I rejected the
> > addition of replace-all recently on tech-pkg.
> 
> If you mean behaviour similar to the one portupgrade has you should reconsider.
> The behaviour described above is absolutelly more desirable than the current one.

pkg_chk is meant for one thing: keep a set of packages current. If
someone really wants to spend the time to optimise the build order to
work incremental (e.g. update every isolated dependency tree in the
update forest), that is certainly possible. Just replacing random
packages in the hope that nothing breaks is inacceptable.

Feel free to read users@ and kernel@ archives for more detailed post,
since this topic comes up regulary. Also check the archive of
tech-pkg at xxxxxxxxxx, it has enough material on the pros and cons as
well.

Joerg