The ports collection has some serious issues

[Kurt Jaeger]

Hi!

> >> On 12/11/2016 03:35 PM, scratch65535 at att.net wrote:
> >>> I have to admit that I avoid ports if at all possible because
> >>> I've hardly ever been able to do a build that ran to completion.
[...]
> >Note that there are over 26000 ports, over 1600 port maintainers and
> >hundreds of third party projects get updated every day. While the port
> >maintainers spend a good portion of their spare time trying to keep it
> >building there will be times that some ports fail to build.
> 
> Which, I think you must agree, is a prima facie case for
> lengthening the release cycle.  

While I can understand where this comes from, it can be read as
"slow down the world, it's too fast" 8-}

> Perhaps The Major Problem currently is that the makefile goes and
> fetches code chunks from sources that are out of our control. [...]

> Contrast that with how it would be if the maintainer got one copy
> of every potential chunk at the beginning of the cycle and stored
> it in ports so that everyone who builds the port builds against a
> known-good set of bits.  It would be both more stable and faster.
> But that's not how it's done.  Why not? 

As far as I know: The idea was to track upstream, not try to become
upstream. Otherwise the changeset (distfiles) repositories would
be come much larger to maintain on the FreeBSD side.

-- 
pi at opsec.eu            +49 171 3101372                         4 years to go !