[RFC/P] Port System Re-Engineering

[Paul Schmehl]

--On Monday, December 03, 2007 11:38:33 -0500 "Aryeh M. Friedman" 
<aryeh.friedman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Coding before the problem is well understood is the worst of all
> possible solutions... specifically in many ways thats how to the port
> system got into such a bad state....

I've run just about every *nix version imaginable - a number of Linuxes 
(Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, and others) and 
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solarix, AIX, just to name a few.  I've used apt-get, 
yum, rpm, et. al.  IMNSHO the ports system is by far the best system I've 
ever used WRT installing/deinstalling software **and solving problems with 
dependencies**.  I have *never* had a problem with the ports system that 
couldn't be easily solved by 1) reading /usr/ports/UPDATING or 2) 
deinstalling and reinstalling a port or ports and 3) running pkgdb -F and 
fixing dependency problems.  I can't say the same for any of the other 
systems, which is why I use FreeBSD exclusively where I can (which is 
almost everywhere now.)

Before you waste any more time, why don't you get very specific about what 
you think the "bad state" of the ports system is.  "I don't like it" 
doesn't qualify nor does "ports freezes suck".

Oddly enough, the ports systems works perfectly for me, with only a very 
occasional problem encountered.  I maintain a few (8) ports myself, so I'm 
quite familiar with how they work as well.

Perhaps your "problem" is a lack of familiarity?

-- 
Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Senior Information Security Analyst
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/