New features
Hello, it’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog and it was about time. I’ve come back from my vacation this week and I have added two new features to pkg_improved which I think are nice features to have.
The first feature is that pkg_add registers the installation time (seconds-since-epoch) in +CONTENTS as a “@comment DATE: 123124124″, pkg_info can then see the installation dates of installed ports with the new -n option (for viewing the date in human readable form) or with the -N option (prints out seconds-since-epoch). The reason why I added this is because I’ve seen people ask how they can get the installation time of packages, and in my opinion I don’t think that the filesystem should be the only holder of such information (e.g. fetching modification time of files contained in /var/db/pkg/*).
The second feature is dependency fixing (I’ve seen that portmaster does this), and what it does is to reconstruct the +REQUIRED_BY file for packages being installed with pkg_add or when pkg_create -O option is called from ports. In detail it checks every installed package for a @pkgdep that matches the installing package it add’s it to the installing package +REQUIRED_BY file. This slows down pkg_add somewhat but I think this should be the correct behaviour for pkg_add.
I’ve also added a percentage progress status to pkg_add -r (remote fetching packages). You can see instructions for testing the improved tools on my blog: http://wiki.freebsd.org/AndersNore/pkg_improved