[38761] trunk/dports/devel/darcs

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jul 31, 2008, at 04:37, Caspar Florian Ebeling wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 6:26 AM, Blair Zajac wrote:
>
>> Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>>>
>>
>>> FYI, when you add a variant, you don't need to increase the port
>>> revision, since nothing will change for those users who already had
>>> the port installed.
>>
>> But on the other hand, if you weren't aware of this variant, there  
>> would be no
>> way to tell.  With a bump in revision, you can check for new  
>> variants.
>
> I think you're mistaken. You do get the latest variants from the
> current portfile, independently of the revision installed.

Yes, if you type "port variants foo" you will learn about all of port  
foo's variants, even if you had installed the port previous to those  
variants existing (assuming your ports and portindex are up to date).  
However, if you installed the port earlier, how would you know that  
you should run "port variants foo" now? How would you know that a new  
variant you might care about had become available? Blair is saying  
that the fact that a port shows up in the output of "port outdated"  
should be a signal to the user to run "port variants" on that port to  
see if any new variants are available. I say that "port outdated" is  
only for informing you of ports that are outdated on your system, and  
in my other message I suggested that we could build a new mechanism  
by which users could be informed of new variants.

On further reflection, I'm not sure that's necessary. Because if a  
user needs a variant that is not available at the time, the user  
should file a ticket requesting that variant, or Cc themselves on an  
existing ticket requesting that variant. When the variant is added to  
the port, the ticket will be updated and closed, which will send an  
email to the user, thus notifying them of the availability of the  
variant.

The same applies to ports. If a user goes looking for a port and  
discovers there is no such port, but it later becomes available, the  
user won't be informed of that either, unless they go looking for it  
again, or they are Cc'd on the ticket via which the port was added.

The moral of the story is that users should Cc themselves on tickets  
whose resolutions they're interested in, and file tickets for  
unresolved issues which don't yet have tickets.