[ANNOUNCEMENT] The pkgsrc-2008Q2 Branch

[Alistair Crooks]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 12:12:29AM +0300, Cristi Magherusan wrote:
> Hello,
> On Sat, 2008-07-26 at 08:43 +0100, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> > The pkgsrc-2008Q2 Branch
> > ========================
> > 
> > The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2008Q2
> > branch, which has support for more packages than previous branches. 
> > As well as updated versions of many packages, the infrastructure of
> > pkgsrc itself has been improved for better platform and compiler
> > support.
> 
> Congratulations and many thanks to everyone who contributed!
> 
> For the future releases, do you have any plans to include an officially
> supported tool that will properly update/rebuild all or some of the
> installed packages on a system, without removing everything and
> rebuilding from scratch, while still maintaining the binary consistency
> of the system? I'm thinking at something like the portupgrade tool from
> FreeBSD.

We don't have portupgrade, but there are a number of other ways of looking
at the problem.

1. "make update" - looks at all the packages installed, including pre-reqs,
deletes the outdated packages, and attempts to build them all again. This
can leave you without a working package if the build fails for any reason.
Caveat return-presser.

2. "make replace" - addresses the problems with "make update" by going
through all the pre-reqs to find out of date packages, and builds the
out of date one. When it's built, a copy of the old package is kept,
the old package is deleted, the new one installed, and all references
are fixed up. This may not DTRT if a shared library bumps the major
number. It is accompanied by a warning that data loss may ensue just
in case of the major number bump.

3. "pkg_rolling-replace" - the nearest thing to automating this scheme.

4. Use pkg_comp to build packages in a chroot environment, and then have
an install-binary-package fest.

In passing, note that pkgsrc numbering scheme is logical, and increasing,
and so we can do <, <=, >, >= matching for things like audit-packages,
calculation of down-level packages etc

Hope that helps,
Alistair