Matthias Andree wrote:

I don't believe that any bikeshedding on this list would have contributed any useful ideas except maybe "don't change anything", which has been considered as an option (but not pursued). FWIW, the change isn't so major at all. Instead of outdated indices from CVS, you now get no indices. The 'major' fallout if caused by portupgrade, but I haven't seen anybody complaining about portupgrade yet.

Setting PORTS_INDEX (in environment or pkgtools.conf) to some other value than portupgrade's default (PORTSDIR/INDEX) should avoid the constant rebuilding for portupgrade users, redefining INDEXFILE in make.conf to something different than INDEX or INDEX-5 should avoid it for non-portupgrade users.

Perhaps somebody can verify this so it can go into an UPDATING entry...

I think one has been mentioned in this thread, but since it's written in perl, it's not a candidate for base-system inclusion...

Perhaps the recent events will contribute to depart from the stalemate ports have been in, with no real development going on and portupgrade being 'good enough' for everybody. Perhaps it will just result in portupgrade stopping depending on INDEX to the extent as it does now, which will be 'good enough' again for most people.