Doug Barton wrote at 13:45 -0800 on Jan 12, 2008: > I have actually advocated in the past that ALL ports should have version > numbers, and that we then create virtual ports (symlinks, whatever) that > point to whatever is the "current" version of that software. Different > developers dislike that idea for different reasons, but my opinion is > still that from the user perspective this would make life a lot easier.
I do this for a site-wide nfs shared installed apps dir at work (ignoring the many edge cases, it's basically this: install to PREFIX=/site/dist/${PKGNAME} and make sym links to /site/bin, /site/lib). It's not particularly easy given the current ports propensity to have everything in /usr/local, but I find it worthwhile. It does make life easier (for both users and admins) for at least a few reasons: - multiple versions of the same port can co-exist (sometimes until a newer one is proven to work) - live upgrades don't affect people that may be running an older version of a port since the old port is still around (and just re-pointing a sym link to the new version doesn't make an existing running instance of a program fail). - updates are generally transparent to users - having a common shared nfs dir means only having to install a port once and all machines instantly get access. I have my own hacks to the port tree to accomodate this strategy. And no, I won't publish them as they are quite hacky in places, but if there were moves in the direction you describe (not likely as far as I can see due to resistance of the kind you described - and it's not a particularly small task to support something like this officially), I could chime in about how I've been doing it for the last 10 years. Ports based on pkg-config have made this much easier, and for those ports I almost don't have to do anything special at all except set PREFIX to point somewhere other than /usr/local. It's had some bumps in the road over the years, but it mostly just works now. I must say it's been much nicer now that the pointyhat checks for ports that don't handle PREFIX properly. 10 years ago that was a much more prevalent problem. _______________________________________________ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"