Thank you (for making the ports less boring).

[Michal Varga]

On Mon, 2011-09-12 at 18:46 -0500, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:

> > I found Michal Varga's critique snarky and unnecessarily sarcastic...
> 
> I agree that it was unnecessarily sarcastic.  We all make mistakes from 
> time to time.  Michal could have pointed out the mistake and still been 
> nice about it.  I know for myself that when I make a mistake like this 
> that I feel bad enough as it is, and I don't need anyone rubbing it in.
> 
> Stephen

Honestly, I wasn't trying to pick on Gabor any specifically, because as
you say, mistakes can happen.

But the sad part of the story is that we're in 2011 and these kinds of
mistakes still happen, over and over, till absurdity. And not just
"still", they grow by magnitudes which now feels like from month to
month, from week to week (and I'm not going to be experiencing this here
when it finally hits the "days" scale, followed by an implosion of the
Universe).

I'm not writing about this for the first time (in fact this is for the
last time, so hey, at least there's something on a positive note), but
it has gradually become nigh impossible to use FreeBSD as a modern
desktop workstation over the recent years, and especially this last year
has become a true nightmare.

It would be pointless to simply repeat what I already said in those
previous discussions about the current - and very poor - ports quality
(or more specifically, total lack of quality control procedures), and it
would just get ignored again anyway (pretty good pointer being that at
about the same time as the last such thread spawned, just some random
bikeshedding discussion about a proper use of academic english in ports
or whatever pointless crap generated ten-times the same content over
like, 5 minutes tops. Because it's good to have some priorities
straight.)

And if it wasn't Gabor's commit that again brought my OS down to
unusable level, it would be the one next week, or if we are lucky, two
to three weeks from now (but that would be probably this year's record).
Because the current procedures in place not only encourage these kinds
of mistakes, they downright call for them. Because there are no
procedures whatsoever. Not in the ecosystem-wide sense. Not the ones
that are crucial to make the OS actually work as a whole. But hey, I'm
not going to reiterate all that over again. It's been said.

Just that before someone tells me again that I should not upgrade my
ports so frequently, or that I should make (shlib, or any other) backups
before any and every update (how is it that after a decade with ports
such novel idea didn't even cross my mind?), or that I should keep
sending patches every time my system is down again (because that's
obviously the most perfect time to start checking if the update actually
works), or that I should just go install PC-BSD...

...seriously guys?

...SERIOUSLY?

Every time I visit my favorite restaurant, I should probably wait for a
few hours too, quietly watching if someone didn't die of food poisoning
before I finally order for myself, or that I should dig some old food
from the fridge and just bring it over as a backup, or heck, just leave
it be and simply order a pizza. Right? Are there still any more useful
suggestions this time? If so, please, don't make them. Just don't.

So there's just one more thing I will add and I'm done with it all
(after all, I have some desktop migrations ahead of me and those penguin
boxes still won't plan and install themselves, even in 2011):

On Tue, 2011-09-13 at 01:01 +0200, Gabor Kovesdan wrote:
> Btw, from your long mail I see you have lots of free time. You should 
> think of spending that better than writing such long mails. Think about 
> being a FreeBSD volunteer. ;)

Yes, only if I wasn't spending all my free time constantly fixing new
breakages from latest port upgrades. I can easily see why so many people
think that the whole situation is actually pretty funny, or on the
opposite, that no 'situation' with ports even exists at all. Picking
just randomly here:

 ##  From: Gabor Kovesdan <gabor at FreeBSD.org>
 ##  Mailer: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:9.0a1)

 ##  From: Stephen Montgomery-Smith <stephen at missouri.edu>
 ##  Mailer: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.21)

[and watching this on a full-list scale is truly a sight to behold]

Sadly, as an actual FreeBSD desktop user, I don't have the luxury to
just keep politely filing PRs over and over or compile packs of patches
every time a new untested port breaks everything, because by the time
I'm done fixing all the failures (or more probably, still looking for
some ways on how to resolve the remaining ones), my day is long over,
and I sometimes need to even use those FreeBSD boxes as they were meant
to be in the first place.

So believe me, as soon as my systems are all on [insert any modern and
properly maintained desktop OS/distribution that works, which based on
my tests over the last few weeks quite nicely fills Arch Linux, but then
many else would surely work too] and thus my current work on constantly
fixing *my* FreeBSDs is cut down by 99%, I'm all hands in for some good
old fashioned volunteering.

You know, except that I won't have a slightest idea on how much FreeBSD
ports are broken on the large scale (yes, my FreeBSD servers with a
limited scope of ports still run perfectly fine over the decade, thank
you), but that's but a minor issue that nobody around seems to be
bothered with, so I guess I will be fine too in that case.

m.

-- 
Michal Varga,
Stonehenge (Gmail account)