"`port -pf upgrade outdated` is incredibly unsafe" ??

[Kurt Pfeifle]

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 11:54 PM, Lawrence Velázquez <larryv at macports.org>
wrote:

On May 27, 2015, at 4:37 PM, Kurt Pfeifle <kurt.pfeifle at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
> [....]
>
girara was updated an hour ago. Please run a selfupdate and try upgrading
> again.
>
Thanks, it works now.

P.S. Unrelated: Stop using "port -pf upgrade" and never use it again. It's
> incredibly unsafe.
>
Ok then: which one of the two switches is the unsafe one? I guess the -f?
Or has the combination of the two even more damage potential?

I started to make it a habit using them, because *so often* the upgrade
does not run through to continue with a few hundred other packages because
of just one or two or three packages fail… And this requires me to restart
the upgrade every so often, with a changed list of package names.

If the -f (or the combo of -pf) is indeed so terribly unsafe as you say (I
do not doubt your statement, even though I do not understand the reason for
it), then there should be at least one of the following:

   1. Add a warning (including the reason for it) to the port manpage.
   2. Emit a warning on the command line, whenever this option is used.

Currently none of the two is present. So do not wonder, if (some of the
few) users who read man pages also make use of it :)
​
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