RFC: svn for make fetch

Thomas Sandford freebsduser at paradisegreen.co.uk
Sat Nov 14 15:46:36 UTC 2009


Wesley Shields wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 10:00:08AM +0200, Eitan Adler wrote:
>> Actually I was thinking of eventually adding non-svn support as well....
> 
> I don't think bloating bsd.*.mk for the most common VCS out there is a
> good idea, not to mention what happens when someone wants support for
> some oddball VCS that is not normally used?
> 
>> The reason I started on this project is because the version of mplayer in
>> ports is severely out of date. When I tried to update to port I noticed that
>> the project wants you to compile and install from svn. I also noticed a few
>> other ports that have hacks to let the maintainers "use his/her custom
>> scripts" stuck into the port's Makefile. I think it would be good if there
>> was some standardized way of solving both of these problems...
> 
> Sure, but it doesn't belong in bsd.*.mk. Turn it into a script and
> submit it as a regular port.

If it were just one port and/or just a port maintainers tool I'd agree. 
But this is something that affects MULTIPLE ports.

Surely the whole value/purpose of the ports build infrastructure is to 
present a consistent way of doing things rather than different 
maintainers doing their own thing and solving problems in different, and 
quite possibly sub-optimal ways and/or bloating multiple individual port 
Makefiles with what could be kept in a single bsd.*.mk file.

And if the file were (say) bsd.vcs.mk and were pulled in only if one of

USE_SVNFETCH
USE_CVSFETCH
USE_GITFETCH

etc were defined then the impact of the bloat on other ports is minimal.

A quick scan of ports reveals that the following contain the string "svn 
export" in their Makefile

ports/cad/kicad-devel
ports/comms/wsjt
ports/comms/wspr
ports/devel/compiler-rt
ports/devel/llvm-devel
ports/devel/thrift
ports/games/evq3
ports/games/q2pro
ports/games/freeorion
ports/games/worldofpadman
ports/net-im/cjc
ports/www/twiki
ports/www/foswiki
ports/x11-toolkits/gigi

This thread has revealed at least two further ports that use a svn 
distribution but where this is hidden from the user. That's 15 ports 
already that could be sharing common code instead of doing it 
themselves. How many do you need?

-- 
Thomas Sandford


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