[MacPorts] Migration modified

[Dan Ports]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 02:45:08PM -0600, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> I don't think we want this shell script. Certainly its position in the wiki makes it look official, and I can't endorse it. It doesn't, for example, take into account three important aspects of the Migration process:

I'll take your word on this particular shell script (I haven't looked
at it) -- but I think that such a script, if done right, would be a
great thing to have.

When I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I found the migration process about as
far from user-friendly as possible. Aside from the (understandable)
need to rebuild everything, the instructions weren't easy to follow
with a lot of ports installed:

 - what are the ports I actually want to use vs dependencies? Easy to
   miss some when picking them out of a list of hundreds of installed
   ports.
 - what are the non-default variants I specified? I wound up searching
   for '+'s to find them, but that also matches +darwin, etc.
 - what order to install them? I don't know the entire dependency tree
   offhand...

These seem like they'd be comparatively easy to track/compute
programatically, especially if someday port can keep track of what's
installed by explicit request vs dependencies.

I realize that this is probably an issue of time rather than anything
else, but I just wanted to throw my experiences out there. Perhaps
someday I'll actually find time to do something about it.

Dan

-- 
Dan R. K. Ports              MIT CSAIL                http://drkp.net/