Port system "problems"

[Baptiste Daroussin]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 12:22:28AM +0200, Florent Peterschmitt wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm not a developer and I know how it's difficult to make a port (or 
> some ports, for example VirtualBox) but I think the port system has many 
> "problems":
> 
> 1. Ports are not modular
What do you mean by modular? if you are speaking about subpackages it is coming,
but it takes time

> 2. Option system is not really well documented
What kind of documentation do you need?, please report what you are expected so
that we can improve it

> 3. Some dependencies are totally useless
Please report PR

> 4. So slow...
What is slow do you mean compiling is slow?

> 
> Let me give some examples:
> 
> 1. games/wesnoth should be splitted in games/wesnoth-bin and 
> games/wesnoth-datas. Why rebuild everything when just binaries needs ?

This is coming, it takes lot of time, and some things have to be done first, in
the infrastructure that the user do not see much.

> 2. Why do we have to put WITH_NEW_XORG in /etc/make.conf to get it ? Why 
> not put this var in a port configuration file which will be read by all 
> ports needing this var ?

Because this is not that easy, do you have a technical way to propose? I think
noone is really happy with the WITH_NEW_XORG, but this is the "less worse" :)
way we found, if you have a better way to propose, please step up and propose.

> 3. Why does GNOME really needs x11/yelp which depends on www/libxul, 
> which is a big port to build ? I don't need yelp and I'm sure not to be 
> alone don't need this.

Because everysingle gnome application providing a help menu will spawn the yelp
program so yes yelp is a big dependency of gnome.

> 4. Generating Index, find dependencies. I know that we have time and 
> that's not a priority, but it is slow.
> 
> I know that FreeBSD doesn't "change" because of "less surprising" 
> philosophy (and I'm the first to say it's a good thing, but sometimes 
> not so good), and also *BSD community is certainly less big than GNU 
> community...
> 
> Port system will have some major updates in the future ?

Yes major updates are being written and coming as fast as the free time allow
it, a new more consistent option framework is already in, pkgng is in a beta
phase and binary repositories are available there: http://pkgbeta.freebsd.org,
real uniquename for ports, and stage directory.

Lots of the previous are not really appaeling and most user won't notice them
but they are very important for the furtur.

What will come next is multi package and flavours, but it first needs all the
previous.

regards,
BApt


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