Anand Buddhdev wrote:
You can break anything when you go out of the way to do it. If you had updated the links in the database "pkgdb -F", I think it would have still found that sysconftool was a R-deps, at least, it was when I did a make search right now.I have recently begun to experiment with FreeBSD packages and ports, and I noticed a problem with dependencies:The system is FreeBSD 4.7. I installed a package called "courier" using ports. It had a number of dependencies, which it also installed, including one called "sysconftool". When I then looked at the package database, under sysconftool, I saw that it was a requirement for courier. Attempting to remove sysconftool with pkg_delete failed with the warning that it was required by courier. That was good, and is the kind of behaviour I see with RPM on linux. However, I was able to remove sysconftool by using "make deinstall" in the ports tree. It did warn that it was needed by courier, but removed it anyway. So I then typed "make install" to add it back in, because courier needs it. However, this time round, it was not a requirement for courier (the package database did not show it as a requirement). And I was able to remove it using pkg_delete. To me, this seems wrong: package dependencies are easily lost, and after a while, the packages on a FreeBSD system could become unstable due to missing dependencies. Is this a fault within the ports system, or is it just this one package that's bad? I think the ports system is nice, but if it makes a sysadmin's life difficult with bad dependency management, then I'd have an issue with it. Any comments?
That is part of what portupgrade does for you. You can do things like "portupgrade -ruf sysconftool" and it would have updated sysconftool and everything that used it. Since courier changed 2 months ago, you could have run "portupgrade -Ruf courier" and it would have rebuild courier and everything it uses. The "-uf" option would have rebuilt courier and updated the links.
Portupgrade appears to check the database by running "pkgdb -F" before and after and keeps things hooked together. It is everybodies friend :).
Kent
--
Kent Stewart
Richland, WA
http://users.owt.com/kstewart/index.html
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