Ports system quality

[Michal Varga]

On Sun, 2011-08-28 at 23:30 -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
> > Testing only for "Does it still build?" won't help much anymore if the
> > new version silently broke one of the APIs and while Apache still runs
> > with it fine
> 
> Believe it or not, I understand that. :)  The problem is that extensive
> run-time testing is not within the realm of possibility without an army
> of volunteers. Do you want to organize that effort?

That would be the very opposite of the concept I just described. While
extensive volunteer testing, if considered standalone, is surely not a
bad idea (just that for some reason it never happens anywhere), it lies
in a completely different scope than port maintainers *not* randomly
upgrading dependencies just on their own without regard to other ports
they will affect (and in many cases break, be it on build level, or
run-time level).

I just double checked if I possibly forgot to send the other half of my
email, but nope, it's all right there.



> > Now where I'm trying to get by this:
> > 
> > Either we want to have ports as a "big repository of colorful stuff that
> > even builds", or we want to have some actual products that people can
> > use after they build them. And that needs an additional level of quality
> > control that FreeBSD currently, and horribly, lacks (patches welcome, I
> > know).
> 
> That sounds like PC-BSD to me. (Seriously, give it a try)

Now that's like saying I might want to try *Linux and OS X too (I
occasionally use both, just not as my primary desktop, which is
FreeBSD).

Speaking about PC-BSD, I'm not exactly fan of KDE and also, I find the
concept of PBI packages highly offending. Then again, I can't see how
would PC-BSD help in this case as it's the exact opposite of what I
described. The fact that PC-BSD just tracks ports and builds
self-contained packages from them doesn't automagically make them better
product, it's still the same ports, but now just horribly packaged too.

m.


-- 
Michal Varga,
Stonehenge (Gmail account)