Lion Recovery Partition

Arno Hautala arno at alum.wpi.edu
Mon Oct 17 08:11:00 PDT 2011


On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 10:53, Jeremy Lavergne
<jeremy at lavergne.gotdns.org> wrote:
>> Tie in for what reason?
>>
>> What's your higher goal with the recovery partition / TimeMachine.
>
> We've had a recent thread (I think on -users) about making the
> installation of previous portfile versions easier.
>
> I was wondering if we had a simple way of providing Portfiles of
> previously installed packages, without relying on deactivation to bring
> them back. I realize allowing granular restores is impossible, but
> reverting your entire MacPorts install back to how it was on day X would
> be handy.

This doesn't sound like the kind of thing that should be built in to
MacPorts, but it does sound like a useful 3rd party tool.

One way would be to include the Portfile in the binary archive (I
think this was discussed as well; I'm not sure where it went). Then,
the user could install an old port with: "port install
/path/to/archive".

Personally, I think the proper way to handle this is to implement
version dependencies (may as well do variants as well and close the
oldest open bug MacPorts has #126). Multiple, version-tagged portfiles
could be kept for each port. Then again, there's a reason versions and
variants aren't dependable like this, there's a lot of thought that
needs to go into the design and implementation.


> Does TimeMachine already crawl the MacPorts directories to provide this?

Unless the user has exclude the MacPorts prefix it should be backed up.


-- 
arno  s  hautala    /-|   arno at alum.wpi.edu

pgp b2c9d448


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