ports structure and improvement suggestions
Gary Kline
kline at tao.thought.org
Tue May 9 02:46:22 UTC 2006
On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 12:23:19AM +0300, Sideris Michael wrote:
> On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 02:14:02PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> > On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 10:23:26PM +0200, Pav Lucistnik wrote:
> > > Sideris Michael p??e v po 08. 05. 2006 v 23:09 +0300:
> > >
> >
> > This is likely to start a flame war, or at least a spit-ball
> > fight. I hope not.... Some months ago after using RedHat's
> > update stuff, a few people seemed a bit upset at my enthusiasm.
> > Since then RH got greedy and stopped their free or cheapware
> > approach and I eventually found the next best altrnative to
> > FBSD: Ubuntu. Among their ``idiotware'' apps is a GUI front end
> > to their apt-get stuff. In 11 months of use, I've managened to
> > keep 2 Ubuntu systems current with a few mouseclicks a month.
> >
> > Nutshell, is there a way of using this approach? If not,
> > is there a way of perl- or /bin/sh- or /bin/ch- bundling
> > portupgrade with pkgdb, and other upgrade programs to get
> > something more rational working? Most of the times that
> > portupgrade screws up, it is due to a build failure. Sometimes
> > it's easy to figure out why the build failed; when it is a
> > ./configure snafu, it's always hours of time backtracing.
> > Time N failed builds. ...Too much.
>
> The problems here are really two. Decide a standard way for configuring ports and
> include in the base system a tool that will upgrade the installed ports. Both of
> them are easy to achieve. Having in mind always that there are people in the mood
> to improve things. Bored and irresponsible people should be vanished in my opinion
> cause they are a cancer for a project like FreeBSD. And it is really sad to hear
> that the port maintainers are bored to modify the Makefiles. And it even more awful
> to hear that even if the current Makefiles are modified, there is no way to ensure
> this for future ports. Unacceptable.
Yeah. I'm at least as guilty as anyone because I have four or
five ports under my name--2 I wrote. Since then life has
done some trips on me, I've forgotten the How-to's of creating
or updating a port. So my latest fixes have sat here for
2,3 years. ((I've got small programs that might be useful to
some people, but don't share because the porting is a bear....
that's a side-bar.))
One important q is why aren't packages more widely used?
I have to have at least 5.4 or 5.5 to fetch any pkg. I love
src, but less when it takes hours to download over my ISDN
wire and days to build, say OO. Or firefox. If I want to
see how person X did some function y(), I can grab the source.
--
Suggest that, rather than having endless debates about which
should be the standard method of confguration, people make
pro/con lists and present their conclusions. Re modifying
the makefiles, can this be done largely by script?
--
Gary Kline kline at thought.org www.thought.org Public service Unix
More information about the freebsd-ports
mailing list