On Jan 20, 2007, at 3:27 PM, Salvatore Domenick Desiano wrote:
We've had a couple of longish discussions about how to handle ports with multiple current versions. I think that mysql was the last such debate. Maybe we should have a "policy" about this. I'm thinking something like
- one port for each version that the project, itself, deems to be in current service, each with the version number in it (in this case, postgresql74 postgresql80 postgresql81 postgresql82)
- one default, empty port which simply has a dependency on the most recent version (in this case, postgresql, which depends on postgresql82).
This way, if people do it blindly (postgresql), they get the most recent. If people write ports that need postgresql, they automatically get a dependency on the most recent version. If a writer of another port (say, port "A") discovers that A only works with one specific version of postgresql, they can use one of postgresql{74,81,82} as a dependency. In this case, it would be that port writer's responsibility to update the Portfile for A to the most recent workable dependency (since automatic upgrades have become a non-starter for A).
Incidentally, I only think this should be used for specific ports where more than one major version is constantly in active use (apache, mysql, postgresql come to mind). In other cases a "beta" variant might be a better approach.
Thoughts?
-- Sal smile.
The problem with this is that I remember reading (somewhere) that variants should not change the version! Is that rule to be relaxed in the case of "beta" variants? Peace - John