HEADS UP: Triage of rcNG related problem reports/USE_RC_SUBR

[Matthias Andree]

Greetings,

(Note this is a personal opinion in spite of the HEADS UP, I am not
member of any release engineering teams for FreeBSD!)

Over the past few weeks, I have been forwarded some bogus PRs that
with reports claiming or patches requested

- to add etc/rc.d/foo or etc/rc.d/foo.sh to pkg-plist

- that the installed filename into etc/rc.d/ were bogus

- that rcNG scripts were non-working

or similar.

FreeBSD 6.1 (OSVERSION >= 600101 but < 700000) and more recent 7-CURRENT
versions (OSVERSION >= 700007) have integrated ${LOCALBASE}/etc/rc.d
into the rcorder(8) startup, with early 7-CURRENT, and 6.0 did not do.

THIS MEANS that start scripts for ${LOCALBASE}/etc/rc.d liste in
USE_RC_SUBR are now installed without .sh suffix, where they would have
had the .sh suffix when built for 6.0-RELEASE or early 7-CURRENT.

ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk handles everything automatically: 1) stripping or
adding the .sh suffix for the target system, 2) adding the file with the
right name to the package list.

This also implies that start scripts of ports or packages built for
recent 6-STABLE or 6.1 CANNOT work on FreeBSD 6.0 or older 6-STABLE.

I'll repeat: 6-stable package start scripts WILL FAIL on 6.0-RELEASE!

Can I ask everyone involved in the PR triage process to close (rather
than forward to maintainers) all PRs

- where users report failing start scripts after attempts to "pkg_add
  -r" a 6-stable package on their 6.0-RELASE or older 6[.0]-STABLE system
or
- that claim scripts listed in USE_RC_SUBR were missing the .sh suffix
  (or having an excess .sh suffix).
or
- that request to add or rename USE_RC_SUBR scripts to/in pkg-plist

Maintainers will have to refuse any such changes or reports.
Instead, the users should be asked to build the ports themselves, rather
than use the package.

It is a bit unfortunate that there is no accompanying security branch
for ports, because then this inconsistency WRT etc/rc.d/* scripts
wouldn't have bitten users.

Kind regards,

-- 
Matthias Andree