The image question

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Mar 8, 2007, at 10:30 AM, Yves de Champlain wrote:
> Are there people out there who really use the image installations ?
> I mean, who are activating / deactivating ports on a regular basis,
> in such a way that it would not make sense to install / uninstall  
> them from a tarball instead ?

I've thought for a while that improving archive mode a little and  
deprecating image mode would be a good idea (it's why I patched  
upgrade to work with direct+archive mode when it only worked with  
image mode before).

The one thing we would loose is the potential for ports to depend on  
a specific version of another port that was installed but not  
'active' (ie, you could have multiple versions of some library port  
installed with ports that needed each version linked against the one  
they wanted without having to change the normal install layout of  
that library). I _think_ this is something that jkh has wanted ever  
since images were first implemented.

It seems to me like this just exponentially increases the installed  
system complexities and in the few cases where it would be very  
useful to have multiple different library versions installed, it  
makes more sense to me to alter the port so they can both be  
installed at the same time (like the db43/db44 ports, for example).

I think direct + archive mode makes more intuitive sense as well (and  
gives us an obvious path to distributing binaries, as we would  
eventually just distribute appropriate archives somehow).

> And if I use the direct install mode, what happens to the "post- 
> activate" phase ?

I don't think it gets run. (but it has been a while since I looked).

[g5:~/Projects/macports/dports] dluke% grep -r 'post-activate' . | wc -l
      144

... which isn't too many to look at and change to post-destroot/post- 
install if we ever decide to depricate images.
--
Daniel J. Luke
+========================================================+
| *---------------- dluke at geeklair.net ----------------* |
| *-------------- http://www.geeklair.net -------------* |
+========================================================+
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