Ticket #14796 (pike): please commit

[Rainer Müller]

Eric Hall wrote:
> 	I've always thought this was an excellent idea, it neatly
> solves conflicting version problems (libnet for example) and allows
> a new version of $THIS_DEPENDENCY to be installed without breaking
> $OTHER_SOFTWARE that's linked against $OLDER_VERSION_OF_THIS_DEPENDENCY,
> and/or resulting in the massive rebuild fsck to bring everything back
> to happyness when a dependency is upgraded.

I think it is a horrible idea. It totally defeats the feature of having 
multiple versions of a port but only one active version.

If you start linking into the depot, also rewrite all calls to binaries 
to the depot and all access to /opt/local/share and so on. Otherwise it 
would totally become inconsistent. And I don't understand why you want 
to look for such files inside the depot. The depot stores multiple 
versions and you activate one and only one of them - the others are 
inactive and not used at all.

- If I deactivate a port, I *expect* depending ports to break.
   Of course a port will no longer work if a dependency is not active.
- If I upgrade a port, of course I might also have to rebuild depending
   ports, because the installed library changed.
- If I uninstall an inactive port, I expect it to be *safe* because it
   is not used.

Please tell me what advantage you want to achieve with this?

Rainer