duration of the ports freeze

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

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

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> Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> Even though this is best answered in a more systematic way (an
> "official" review of the entire problem set) here are my reasons for
> being frustrated:
>
> 1. There as has been some work that I am aware on ports I use that has
> not bean released during the freeze for various reasons (such as miro
> and qemu patchs [enable the use of physical drives and run vista
> without crashing]).   None of them are pressing enough for me to
> bypass the ports system because everytime you do so you complicate
> upgrading (have fun keeping track of what you installed from ports and
> what came from vendor tar's)
>
> 2. As a developer I have 3 ports I would like to release ;-)

But this agrees with my original assertion - that the frustration is from 
the port maintainers and originators, rather than the port users.



What solution would you propose.  The only one I can think of is 
that we have a ports-stable and a ports-current.  But I can see many 
people not liking this idea.