The image question

[Yves de Champlain]

Le 07-03-08 à 21:31, Randall Wood a écrit :

>
> 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.

Does post-install make any sense at all in image mode ?  Are there  
really issues that must be dealt with after destroot and before  
activation ?  Most of the post-install procedures are ui_msg stuff.

So could MacPorts have only one finalize procedure that is run after  
install in direct mode and postponed after activation in image mode  
to replace both post-install and post-activate ?

yves