duration of the ports freeze

[Mark Linimon]

On Sat, Dec 01, 2007 at 11:56:42AM -0600, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
> These are all reasonably good suggestions for how to get around the ports 
> freeze.  But they will come with a price, namely someone has to implement 
> these changes (which I guess one of you would do)

fwiw, one of the pkgsrc committers estimates that it takes around 5 people
to handle the work of having a branched tree.

> Furthermore the FreeBSD project tends to be conservative and resistant to 
> big changes.

We have such a large install base that we feel we have to be, in some
respects.

> So what I think you need to do is to really convince others that the port 
> freeze is not just an inconvenience/frustration (and personally I agree 
> with you here), but that it is a major shortcoming with the current 
> system.

No one will argue that it's not an inconvenience and a frustration --
and, fwiw, a lot more work for the committers (and portmgr).

I'm still not exactly clear on why not having the latest-and-greatest
port is such a drawback.  Yes, you're losing bugfixes on those in the
meantime, but we're catching up on bugfixes on the other ones.  Security
updates go in in any case.

mcl