The image question

[Yves de Champlain]

Le 07-03-08 à 13:05, Daniel J. Luke a écrit :

> 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).

Indeed, I tried it recently, having made a custom poppler library for  
specific needs, but it turned out a to be a mess, having to look at  
which version was active before launching this or that app, that was  
when I did remember to watch it.

>
> 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).

I remember being quite convinced by olegb's dplight (darwinports up  
to destroot and rpm afterwards), although there were some bugs on  
rpm's dependencies tracking.

>
>> 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).

That would be a bug.

> [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.

thanks for the details.

yves