Michel Talon wrote:
On Sat, Jul 07, 2007 at 09:57:59AM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
The only reliable way to detect ports which have been installed as
a dependency is to create a database
*shudder* You just tripped over your own argument here. There are
plenty of ways that we could recognize a port that was installed as a
dependency. The one that comes immediately to mind is to create a flag
file in /var/db/pkg/foo (or /var/db/ports/foo) to indicate that the
port was installed as a dependency. It would be trivial for portmaster
and portupgrade to do this, slightly more complicated for it to be
done in bsd.port.mk, but not impossible.
I agree completely with you. Of course when i say that a database has to
be created, this may very well be reduced to a flag somewhere in
/var/db/pkg. For me, /var/db/pkg is a database describing the installed
ports. Wether abusing the filesystem to create this database is good for
performance is a completely different problem, at least it has the
advantage of being very transparent.
IMO adding packages (or ports in this case) should be done using
pkg_install. It's the best means to transparently control package
entries in the system, and it would probably reduce the load on the
bsd.port* Makefiles.
indicating which ports have been required by the end user, and
which ones have been automatically installed.
Well, what happens if an application (rather than a library) gets
installed as a dependency, but you decide that you like that
application, and want to keep it? How do you "promote" something from
"dependency installed" to "user installed?"
Indeed you are right, it should be possible to decide of such a
promotion.
Not unless you have metafiles laying around that identify leaf packages
(i.e. directly user installed packages) over additional node packages
(in this case dependency installed packages).
Personally I think that portmaster's approach is the right one. If you
accidentally delete something that it turns out you really do need,
you can always install it again. On the other hand, the presence of an
empty +REQUIRED_BY file is a very reliable indication that something
was previously installed as a dependency, but is no longer needed.
Typically you can install the java jdk to do programming, and without
any required_by stuff. If you accidently erase it, it will be expensive
to recreate. Obviously this is not a very good example because this one
you will remember. I was thinking more to some obscure ports that you
install by curiosity. After several months, perhaps you discover it is
on your machine, and you have some use for it. Perhaps if you had erased
it, the distfile would have disappeared, or marked broken with
new versions of FreeBSD, no more compilable, etc.
There really isn't a way to work around this problem I believe other
than to have a huge warning banner and show what would be deinstalled
prior to the operation being executed. This is a slippery slope trying
to deal with corner cases like these.
-Garrett
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