A downside of storing the exact results of ‘make -V’

As you know, I’ve been working on branches this long holiday weekend. Today, I managed to get the display of a port on a branch to correctly.

Along the way, I discovered a downside to storing raw data in the database. Take for example this output:

freshports.org=# select name, depends_run from ports_active where depends_run is not null limit 1;
     name      |                          depends_run                          
---------------+---------------------------------------------------------------
 p5-Net-NBName | /usr/local/bin/perl5.20.2:/usr/local/PORTS-head/lang/perl5.20
(1 row)

This is the output of make -V RUN_DEPENDS. You will notice that this repo is not in /usr/ports. In itself, that is OK, except when you change the directory, like I did earlier this month, when I moved everything into /usr/local/repos. After time, this field throughout the database will contain a mixture of the two root directories. This won’t do, because the website needs to strip off the root directory to get at the category/port combination at the end of the file.

Yes, I could just try taking the last of the string, starting at the second to last slash, but that’s not what I want to do. I want to store the raw data, because that’s what make -V gave me. Thus, I will update the data to make sure it is up to date with current directories.

The solution I used was:

update ports set depends_run   = replace(depends_run,   ':/usr/local/', ':/usr/local/repos/'), 
                 depends_lib   = replace(depends_lib,   ':/usr/local/', ':/usr/local/repos/'), 
                 depends_build = replace(depends_build, ':/usr/local/', ':/usr/local/repos/');

update ports set depends_run   = replace(depends_run,   ':/usr/local/repos/repos/', ':/usr/local/repos/'), 
                 depends_lib   = replace(depends_lib,   ':/usr/local/repos/repos/', ':/usr/local/repos/'), 
                 depends_build = replace(depends_build, ':/usr/local/repos/repos/', ':/usr/local/repos/');       

That second update was to reverse any updates to already-correct values.

This change was on my development server. I won’t need to do this update on the production server because that repo has not changed locations.