Where is FreeBSD going?

[Peter Jeremy]

On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 09:08:38PM +0100, Roman Neuhauser wrote:
>    The ports freeze seems to last too long with recent releses. Or
>    maybe it's just I've gotten more involved, but out of the last four
>    months (2003/09/07-today), ports tree has been completely open
>    for whopping 28 days.

I agree the ports tree has not been completely open for as long as it
should be recently.  This is due to unforeseen problems that resulted
in significant delays for both 4.9-RELEASE and 5.2-RELEASE.  It's
difficult to see how this could have been handled any better.
Hopefully there will be fewer problems with future releases.
Non-committers can help here by testing -STABLE and -BETA snapshots
more extensively so that more problems are ironed out before the
ports tags are laid down.  (An alternative might be to delay the
ports tagging until later in the release cycle, but I suspect that
is just as likely to cause problems by having last minute ports
breakages cause delays).

>    Limitations of CVS don't exactly help either. The fact that you need
>    direct access to the repository to be able to copy a tree with
>    history (repocopy) as opposed to this operation being part of the
>    interface[1], which means being lucky enough to find a committer,
>    and get them commit the stuff within the blink of an eye ports is
>    open, further constrains people's ability to work on FreeBSD with
>    some satisfaction.

I'm not sure what is meant by this paragraph.  CVS doesn't support
renaming files or directories - which can be a nuisance.  As used
within the Project, "repocopy" means manually copying parts of the
repository to simulate file/directory duplication or renaming.  This
ability is restricted to a very small subset of committers - normal
committers have to request repocopies as do non-committers.  OTOH,
replicating the complete FreeBSD CVS repository is trivial via either
CVSup or CTM and both procedures are documented in the handbook.

Peter