Binary packages not rebuilding against updated libraries

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 26, 2018, at 10:15, Ken Cunningham wrote:

> On 2018-04-26, at 8:09 AM, Joshua Root wrote:
> 
>> Detecting this situation and rebuilding locally is automatic. Actually increasing the revision of the dependents so updated archives are made available is not.
> 
> There's next years GSOC project for you :>

Probably half a dozen or more different scripts already exist in mailing list archives or elsewhere for increasing the revision of portfiles. But they each have their limitations and don't work for all possible portfiles. It would be exceedingly difficult to create a script that works with any portfile, since a portfile has the full flexibility of the Tcl programming language at its disposal. This flexibility is great, but it makes automated editing of the files much more difficult than it would be if the files used a more simple syntax. For example, most of the aforementioned scripts look for the "revision" line and increase the number; if not found, add a "revision 1" line after the "version" line. But this is not necessarily the correct thing to do for ports that have subports; in many cases, it is more correct to increase each subport's revision individually. And not all ports literally use a "revision" line. Take the qt5 ports for example which construct the revision line programmatically from another data structure.

If we decide that want to programmatically increase port revisions, we need to figure out what syntax in the portfile would make that easiest to accomplish, then introduce policy requiring portfile authors to adhere to that policy.