duration of the ports freeze

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

On Sat, 1 Dec 2007, Aryeh M. Friedman wrote:

> Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
>> Aryeh M. Friedman wrote:
>>
>> For some reason, people contributing to this mailing list are
>> getting frustrated because some of the applications are now getting
>>  to be about a month old.  But why should we expect to have the
>> latest and greatest in version number of application?  It is
>> because this is what we usually have, and so a periodic hiccup is
>> out of the ordinary and so frustrates us.
>>
>> But suppose you are running Red Hat Linux instead.  Do you also get
>>  the latest and greatest in this super timely manner?  (To be
>> honest this is not a rhetorical question, but my guess is "no.")
>>
>> In fact, who feels this frustration.  Is it the ordinary user?  Or
>> is it us port maintainers who wish they could get their more recent
>>  PR's accepted?
>>
>> Surely this frustration is felt by us because we have information
>> that things could be a little more up to date.  But if we weren't
>> in the know, then we wouldn't be so upset.
>
> I am not suggesting we do a major overhaul before ports are
> unfrozen... what I am suggesting is there is always room for
> improvement and the frustrations voiced should be looked as an
> opportunity to improve it instead of us (the complainers) crying in
> our milk.

I feel that your deflection of the points I made was a little unfair. 
My question is - why exactly is there a frustration?  Is it because the 
FreeBSD community have somehow set expectations to be "totally up to date" 
a little too high?  Are we simply expecting more from FreeBSD than we get 
from Linux distributions or MS, simply because the average user has 
tremendous knowledge and insight into the internal development process?

Remember, I'm just an average user, just like you.  I have no special axe 
to grind in defending FreeBSD.

Stephen