depends_run and activation

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Wednesday March 17 2021 06:53:53 Ryan Schmidt wrote:

>I think your proposal would result in a lot of unnecessary activations of older dependencies which could have consequences for other ports.

Without versioned dependencies would be helpful t avoid that (e.g. in Debian you can indicate a dependency on versions older or newer than some reference, but also when a package breaks others older or newer than some given version.

This is why is talked about "at least proposing to", and that could be an optional feature. I really cannot predict how complex this could become to grasp, but users savvy enough to attempt this sort of thing would have to sort that kind of complexity out anyway. I do know that Debian's versioned dependencies aren't without issues: it can be hell to figure out why certain upgrades refuse to apply (and if you happen to do the full upgrade when your mirror is still in the process of fetching all new packages, well, let's just say I almost lost my desktop environment once because a crucial common dependency would be broken by an update elsewhere).

It just occurs to me that with APFS you could take snapshots of the entire $prefix and *maybe* use those to roll back temporarily the entire $prefix tree when you really need to go back to an old version with crucial features without breaking functionality in other ports. 

I just tried running portindex on the tree that had the port with the newly added depends_run . It didn't make a difference ...

R.