Re: building thunderbird port on v. 4.9

From: Michel Talon (talon_at_lpthe.jussieu.fr)
Date: 05/31/04 

Date: Mon, 31 May 2004 14:23:51 +0000 (UTC)

Kris Kennaway <kkenn@xor.obsecurity.org> wrote:
>
> 1) That doesn't happen when "you decide to install package whatever",
> it happens when the user instructs the ports system to forceably
> deinstall all files installed by a package, when some of those files
> are still in use. If you properly use an upgrade tool like
> portupgrade, it correctly preserves the old library version.

Let us say i wanted to install wxpython. Due to the recursive
dependencies, i had to rebuild half of the ports on my machine,
and this machine received a fresh install with FreeBSD-5.1.
Very soon of course, the build stops because i need to do a make
deinstall, make reinstall. After a few games of this sort i ask
"to forceably deinstall ...", and of course i am finding myself
with libintl erased, libpango erased, etc. etc. And, cherry
on the cake, even after all these trouble the build stops in
the perl::xml port, for some "internal error" of the ports system.
Sorry to say that, but it sucks. I have hard time to think that
it is really necessary to use a perl xml parser to install
a python windowing system. To me things are rapidly becoming out of
control, and beleive me or not, i had upgraded my previous machine from
FreeBSD-2.2.5 to now without ever encountering any trouble up to recent
time. Sure i had a couple of tcl and tk ports, but i could not care
less. Things basically worked OK when doing make install in a ports
directory. At least this was the situation as long as portupgrade
had not been invented, so that cloning the Debian way was considered the
most fashionable thing under the sun.

> 2) It's always been this way, so your little diatribe about how
> FreeBSD suddenly sucks is wrong, and..

It may have always been this way, you are much more competent to assert
that than me, but i have never encountered such problems until recently.
And i can say more, i regularly follow this newsgroup and i don't
remember having seen such issues reported in the past. On the other hand
the gettext problem is regularly reported here, and not be me. While
i have been hit 3 times i have never mentioned it, since other people
had done it previously.

>
> 3) ..it's not because a maintainer "thought he knew better than the
> user"
>
> 4) FreeBSD isn't the one who decides to change from libfoo.x to
> libfoo.y. For example, why are you not directing your ire at the
> gettext developers who bump their library revision for no good reason?
>

I have no problem rejecting the fault on the GNU people if it can make
you happy. Nevertheless i think that it is an error that make install
requires a make deinstall. There is no problem that several shared
libraries live in /usr/local/lib, since they are versioned. One may
even introduce versioned symbols as in Linux. As for the executables
if a new one overwrites an older one, where is the problem?
Preserving space on the disk? This is futile.
Your answer and Thierry's one, is "never make install in a port",
run portupgrade instead, which takes care of everything. Was life
possible in FreeBSD before the introduction of portupgarde?
Apparently no, if i beleive you. My opinion is that portupgrade
is *not* the solution of this problem, it is a far too much invasive
tool, put it simply i don't like it. I don't want half of my ports
updated when i install new stuff, i want the minimal fuss,
compile it with the libs that are present on the box, and don't care to
require the most recent version of anything related. Portupgrade is
the solution to upgrade to a RELEASE since then most of the binary
packages exist. As soon as you cvsup the ports tree, you almost never
find appropriate binary packages and it rapidly becomes extremely
inconvenient.

> Kris 

-- 
Michel TALON

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