Upgrades that include netpbm

[Brandon Allbery]

On Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 3:56 AM, Barrie Stott <zen146410 at zen.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On 12 Jun 2015, at 22:08, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 1:26 PM, Mihai Moldovan <ionic at macports.org>
> wrote:
> > That would break other ports that depend upon netpbm. Worse, I think
> port will
> > automatically re-activate it, if it comes to such a port.
> >
> > I would hope those are only upgraded *after* netpbm itself --- and using
> a port that has a `port upgrade` scheduled against it is a dicey
> proposition no matter what.
>
> I am puzzled and a little worried about the part of  your sentence after
> '---'. Does it mean that once I know a port upgrade is needed I should do
> it before any other computing work? I usually do other things alongside an
> upgrade.
>

What do you believe would happen if you are running something *while* it is
upgraded?

Some will just happen to work, mostly simple ones. Ones that use plugins
will often crash if the plugins go missing or are from the wrong version.
Others may behave erratically (iTerm2 is prone to stop opening new windows,
for example). In the case of netpbm where you generally build pipelines
that run for short times, you may get version skew between programs in the
pipeline or missing program errors or just strange results.

Filesystems are not transactional; it can't keep a snapshot of something
you're actively using while installing a new version.

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/attachments/20150613/15aa32a1/attachment.html>