Eclipse as part of the ports/java tree? [Was freebsd eclipse plugins & mailing list]

[Mark Linimon]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 10:10:26AM -0700, Vizion wrote:
> I am now faced with the question is the ports tree as inflexible as some 
> people suggest or are some members of our meritocracy more inflexible than 
> the freebsd assets? 

This is a complete oversimplification of the situation.

There are some hard-coded assumptions in the ports tree -- one of which is
that there are two levels, categories and ports -- and these assumptions
are mirrored in the repositories of tens of thousands if not hundreds of
thousands of users, and thousands of lines of shell scripts and database
programs that create the binary packages and monitor the results of those
build processes.

So when you suggest that the only way that Eclipse can be supported is
to have a multilevel ports tree -- as you are seeming to -- you are clearly
totally misunderestimating the amount of effort involved.

In your most recent email I think you are finally getting a lot closer to
what I consider 'real' problem.  IMHO the interesting problems you want to
solve are the 'search' and 'browse' problems.  Directory names controlled
by CVS structures in an unbranched tree, which are then mirrored all around
the world, are really poor paradigms for these problems.  Herve has
suggested some better tools for these which are better ways to think
about these problems and you should look at those.  We certainly need more.

The meta-plugin idea is also worth considering.

But restructuring the entire tree, even to add a few hundred ports, is
simply not feasible with the level of volunteer effort we have and the
number of people that depend on the current structure worldwide.

mcl