On 02/09/2012 01:04, Tim Kientzle wrote: > Will new versions of pkgng support old packages? > > Some folks maintain their own package repositories and > will get rather grumpy if an update to pkgng requires them > to rebuild their entire repository.
There's a distinction between the format of pkg tarballs, and the
formats of the repository catalogue database or the locally installed
packages database.
If you're maintaining your own repository, then an update to the repo
catalogue format means you'ld just need to re-run 'pkg repo'. You won't
need to rebuild all the existing package tarballs in your repository.
If the repository catalogue format has changed, pkg repo will detect
this, and automatically do a full repo catalogue rebuild rather than an
incremental one.
As rebuilding the repo database is something you'ld do routinely anyhow
as part of normal maintenance I don't see this as being a significant
extra burden.
Similarly, an update to the locally installed packages database schema
will be applied transparently when you first use the updated version of
pkgng. It won't require you to reinstall any packages.
There aren't any plans to change the pkg tarball format that I know of
at the moment, but if there were, then they certainly would have to
maintain backwards compatibility -- old pkg tarballs will still work
with the newer pkgng. Not sure about any guarantees that vice-versa
would always work, but way the YAML metadata in the pkg tarball is
handled is tolerant of new additions, so it should usually be possible
to arrange things so that an older pkgng can cope with a newer pkg tarball.
Cheers,
Matthew
--
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey
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