GSoC: Announcing accepted students and projects 2011

[Clemens Lang]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 12:40:04PM +0200, Rainer Müller wrote:
> Derek, Clemens, Felipe, welcome to our community!

Thank you.

> Although you have already introduced yourself on the mailing list with
> your proposals, it would probably be a good idea if you three could
> reply with a few words about your upcoming projects.

Upgrading libraries can be a tedious task – if the API changes with the
upgrade, and the old version is deleted, binaries linked against this
library will no longer work, since the loader will not be able to locate
the necessary dylib file (API changes force a change in version numbers
and thus file names).
Such breakage is not immediately apparent. It is only on the next run of
the software that a user will notice these problems. Other source-based
distributions have come up with methods to detect and fix these
problems, e.g. Gentoo has revdep-rebuild.
My task this summer will be to build a new subcommand
	port rev-upgrade
that will detect and fix such errors by rebuilding the broken packages.
Depending on how fast I can implement this, we might consider running
this automatically after upgrading ports.

Looking forward to working with you,
-- 
Clemens Lang