questions regarding selfupdate issue

[Arno Hautala]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 8:45 AM, René J.V. <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday November 13 2014 14:04:06 Clemens Lang wrote:
>
>> one of the image tarballs. Some users do this in order to save space on an SSD,
>> but doing so is wrong and dangerous.
>
> What, it's wrong and dangerous to make place by removing unused files? You ever use Swahili, Klingon and whathaveyou, or other less obscure languages you simply don't know but for which lots of ports add translations?

It's wrong and dangerous to meddle with files that are installed and
managed by a package system. The system expects files to be there and
doesn't know how to handle the case when they're missing. Granted,
port could be more helpful by indicating that the installation is
broken and maybe even offer to reinstall, ignoring any existing
archives.

> I agree one has to know what one does when going in and removing any file from a system; it would be nicer if the install procedure provided a way to prune this kind of useless space wasters.

Adding variant support to exclude excess languages would be a nice
feature. But, how much space are you really saving?

> In theory it should be fine to do this kind of pruning in ${destroot} before the installation phase, right?

That'd be better than trashing the files after they've been installed
and tracked by port. I wouldn't call it ideal or guaranteed not to
break.

>> You should uninstall and re-install all ports for which images_to_archives.tcl
>> is triggered.
>
> Yeah, I figured that. Too many of them. I had a look at the script if I could "hack it in" to be done automatically, but it's too much unknown territory for me. My hunch I'd do it on a port-by-port basis when problems arise seems to be the way to go.

The easiest way would be to follow the migration instructions that
describe how to get a list of installed ports, uninstall everything,
and reinstall from your saved list.

-- 
arno  s  hautala    /-|   arno at alum.wpi.edu

pgp b2c9d448