Some Port make suggestions

[Kevin Sindhu <kevin@tgivan.com>]

Hello,

I was a bit hesitant to decide where this thread might live. Anyway, I
have a few suggestions, that we can implement in our ports tree. What
do you all think?

1) make update - I am very impressed by this feature in NetBSD, and
IMO, it shouldn't be that hard to bring in.

What it does:

cd $PORT; make update (This should update to the latest package, and
uninstall the older package while it updates it).

Reason - Lately I had to install opera on my box, and had redhat emul,
but it needed redhat-p1, so I need to go through some hoops, some
pkg_delete -force etc. before I had my opera port installed.


2) make installnet 

I propose that we have an option of installing the whole package (and
its dependencies), directly from one of the openbsd/mirror ftp servers
from one of the pre-packaged binaries using make installnet, which
fetches the pre-compiled binary, checks checksum, and does a pkg_add.

Reason - I had to install kde from the ports, and after 12 hours, the
compile is still going.

I agree, we can always have pkg_add ftp:xxx/package.tgz, however, this
would take care of the whole package and its dependencies.

Problems that may arise - 

1) This might be a bit tricky for non-i386 hardware, as of now I see :

i386/        index.txt    m68k/        powerpc/     sparc/       vax/ 

in the 2.8 packages tree.


2) Unresolved dependencies, such as -stable to -current upgrades etc.
which may break certain libraries.


Regards

-- 
Kevin Sindhu
Systems Engineer		E-Mail: kevin at tgivan dot com
TGI Technologies Inc.		Tel: (604) 872-6676 Ext 321
107 E 3rd Avenue		Fax: (604) 872-6601
Vancouver,BC V5T 1C7
Canada.