On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Peter Jeremy wrote: > There's no mechanism for updating a package - and it's not clear (to > me anyway) how this can be done safely in a general way. Where the > update is only minor (and won't affect the dependent packages), you > can use something like:
For an update to work, files that must be preserved (shared libraries mainly) over an update must be tagged. If libfoo-1.0 is installed and I upgrade to libfoo-2.3, the libfoo-1.0 package should be removed except /usr/local/share/libfoo.so.1.0. Then libfoo-2.3 gets installed and *inherits* /usr/local/share/libfoo.so.1.0 in its +CONTENTS so that if you want to do a wholesale removal of the libfoo package in the future, you can do it. A completely different approach to this dependency nightmare is to link statically. I know there are drawbacks to this and the costs are too great in numerous situations. But if you *can* practically do this, you can demote a runtime dependency to a build time dependency which is a Good Thing for your sanity. -john To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
