Re: hardcoded -C argument to ${INSTALL}

On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 10:24:43PM -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> I'm still partial to the obsolete file list, like NetBSD does.
> Anything else I wouldn't trust.

I raised various ideas for this a few months ago because some old cruft
had screwed up building current after not having done so for a while.

I like the idea of modifying install to register parts of the tree
as either in some db file or a package, it's something I've had in
the back of my mind for about 8 years :-) One issue with this solution
is that last time I looked not everything actually uses install to
install the files. I decided after playing around for a while that
packaging the base tree was an orthogonal problem to file management and
that another tool needed to exist that could scan a filesystem and
report on "unregistered" files.

Blindly removing files that are old compared to the new release
will get you in a lot of trouble when you start deleting libraries.
There needs to be a lot more complexity in that area, such as scanning
all executables to see if the library is still being used and then
moving it to a compat dir instead of deleting it (think about all that
other code that's not part of FreeBSD that you have on the box). There
may also be issues if include files change but there's linkage between
newly compiled programs and older libraries built against the old
headers (again remember there's a lot of ports code/libraries on most
people's boxes).

So while a quick and dirty fix may seem to get the ball rolling,
it's also like to bite people badly in a lot of situations.  The
problems aren't insurmountable but there is a lot more complexity
involved in managing our base installation files than might be
immediately apparent.

-- 
Paul Richards