Robert Huff said: >Michel TALON writes: > >> Finally >> the file UPDATING should be forcefully removed from the system > > While I support all reasonable efforts to get automation to >always Do The Right Thing(tm), my reaction to this is: absolutely >not. > Until you can show there are no, and will never again be, edge >cases which break the system, documention for human invervention is >always the right choice.
Your answer is very interesting and allows me to go further in the reasoning. Indeed the UPDATING file is here to solve edge cases. My point is that there shouldn't be any edge cases, if there are some it is because something somewhere has been ill designed, which is not so suprising since the system has been conceived by Jordan Hubbard when the number and complexity of ports was much smaller. I certainly don't have any precise idea of the things which should be changed so that edge cases disappear, only *very experienced* people having observed a lot of failure cases could give correct advices. It is not impossible to design a system which works automatically without having any recourse to manual intervention, after all, as much as it may displease some people here, it is a fact that Debian works this way (and Debian-like systems like Ubuntu). Having a file which documents manual intervention is a perpetual tentation to do the things the sloppy way, which in fact frequently occurs in FreeBSD. As long as such a behavior continues, the authors of portupgrade, portmaster etc. are building on sand. -- Michel TALON _______________________________________________ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
