At 20:01 -0500 on 2007-10-24 Ryan Schmidt wrote:
Nobody forces you to upgrade any port, or any other software on your machine, for that matter. You can choose to upgrade, or not.
Yes it does: An automatic `port upgrade outdated' will upgrade everything. Should I then sit down every time and decide what I want to upgrade and what I don't? On what should I base my decision? There is no keyword to help me out. I was under the impression that Macports is a production system, so it should upgrade to a usable configuration automatically--if not all the time at least most of the time.
That being said, new versions should be better than old ones.
Precisely. GNOME in particular is consistently problematic at first when it is upgraded and it should not be.
If you find problems with new versions, please file tickets.
Of course, but in the meantime I would like to keep a usable installation. If I have a test machine (which I don't) I would be more than happy to live on the edge and report bugs; however whenever I am upgrading my production machine I like to have things mostly working--the DE being one important piece, I like to have it working all the time.
How would splitting the ports tree into stable and unstable help? Specifically, if we declare our current ports tree "unstable", by what mechanism does software get to the "stable" branch? Who decides what is stable and when? We currently have no information about how many of our ports even build currently, and of course that varies by OS and platform.
That's an excellent point. I guess the maintainer could decide on the matter. What I would like to see is actually versioning (Gentoo style), tagged with a stable/unstable keywords. If I want to keep a stable system, I can keep within the stable versions; if I want to live on the edge, I can go to development; if I am tired of living on the edge I can reset my keyword and re-upgrade (port upgrade will then need to be capable of downgrading too); if I want to live in the edge only for a portion of the tree, then I should be able to "unmask" ports individually. Right now I don't even know what I did when the system broke--there are no longs so I cannot go back in time even manually unless I write down the list of ports being upgraded before I issue the upgrade command. But then I might be the only one who could use this, so do not take my comments more seriously than they are worth. Cheers, Stefan -- If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic. --Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass