The image question

[Randall Wood]

On 8 Mar 2007, at 13:05, Daniel J. Luke wrote:

> 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.

A healthy chunk of those are so written because they broke if the  
port-activate process was run during the destroot or post-install  
phase. See the long history of problems with scrollkeeper for an  
example.

> --
> Daniel J. Luke
> +========================================================+
> | *---------------- dluke at geeklair.net ----------------* |
> | *-------------- http://www.geeklair.net -------------* |
> +========================================================+
> |   Opinions expressed are mine and do not necessarily   |
> |          reflect the opinions of my employer.          |
> +========================================================+
>
>
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Randall Wood
rhwood at mac.com

"The rules are simple: The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes.  
All the
rest is just philosophy."