duration of the ports freeze
Ade Lovett
ade at FreeBSD.org
Mon Dec 3 02:20:31 PST 2007
On Dec 03, 2007, at 01:18 , Aryeh M. Friedman wrote:
I'm probably going to regret joining this thread, but quite frankly,
the amount of horse being thrown around has gotten way out of hand.
> I have practical knowledge here in working with different dependency
> management systems (which is essentially what the ports system is)...
> now that being said much of it is based on seeing how different people
> have solved the problems raised by the methods you site as being
> "invalid"
Fine. Prove your practical knowledge. Take a small subset of the
ports tree, x11/xorg springs to mind, bang around a few ideas, show
why they're "better", and we'll take it from there.
Interminable threads about "why <X> sucks", "why <Y> is better", "why
don't you do it with <Z>" gets nowhere. Even a cursory glance at the
archives of this mailing list would show that.
> That is the purpose of the survey I sent out to start to uncover what
> exactly the strengths and weaknesses are and decide if the weaknesses
> are sufficent to warrent any kind of re-engineering.
Unfortunately, as with most surveys, it suffers from a fundamental
flaw in that it is self-selecting. It has gone out to that tiny
subset of folks that:
(a) use FreeBSD
(b) use FreeBSD ports/packages
(c) subscribe to ports at FreeBSD.org
(d) feel like filling out a survey
By my reckoning, just those 4 points have deselected at *least* 99% of
folks that would potentially benefit from *any* kind of reworking.
Hopefully, y'all will take this as constructive criticism from someone
that (a) actually really does give a damn about FreeBSD/ports and (b)
spends a lot of time, in conjunction with others, doing heavy-lifting
infrastructural changes that aren't eye-candy.
Around here, action, and not words, are taken much more seriously.
We've heard the words before (albeit dressed and dolled up in a myriad
of different way).
Y'all are *not* going to get a (potential) rewrite of the ports system
right first time. 18k+ ports, 4 different OS versions, at least 5
"useful" architectures. You do the math.
Set up a wiki somewhere. Announce it to the community at large (hint,
that means more than sending mails to @FreeBSD.org mailing lists).
Put up some proposals (at this point, it really doesn't matter how
hair-brained they might be). Let folks contribute in terms of
editing. See what comes out of it.
Highly restrictive mailing lists are *not* the right medium here.
-aDe
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