I've seen a few updates that change gratuitous details, such as the package name or the base directory where things live...
PLEASE REMEMBER TO CHECK THAT THINGS UPDATE AFTER YOUR UPGRADE. It's *not* a new port, so people using the old one should be able to update. Again, here's what's going on for an update. - pkg_add first checks the name of the installed package. By default, it will *not* look at packages with a different stem. So, foo-1.0 will *not* update to foo2-2.0. => if you want to rename the package, this requires a quirks addition. *this is costly*. Not incredibly so, but enough that gratuitous renames are very much frowned upon. - once candidates have been found based on their names, pkg_add will look inside to figure out which candidates can actually update the old package. First, packages must conflict. Again, packages conflict with packages of the same stem by default. If the stem, changes, you need to add a conflict annotation. => So to update from foo-1.0 to foo2-2.0, you need *both* a quirks and a @conflict foo-* in foo2-2.0. - the package system uses the FULLPKGPATH of both packages to figure out update paths: that's the way that, for instance, stable/postfix stays on the stable/postfix branch, and does not switch over to snapshot/postfix arbitrarily... => if you change the FULLPKGPATH or the flavor, you also need a @pkgpath annotation in the new package. *ALL THOSE CHANGES ARE THERE FOREVER*. If you do a name change, a subdir change, you can't go back, and we have to support the old names over long period of times. The package system basically never breaks, you can *still* update package installations from 5 years ago without a problem. => if you fuck that up, going back to the old scheme may be complicated. Package updates normally have some failsafes to avoid going backwards: see the concept of "package signatures" used by out-of-date. When the package base name changes, there is NO LONGER any possible comparison (see packages-specs(7) for normal version comparisons). => this again is a minor reason not to change this too much.
