The ports collection has some serious issues

[Grzegorz Junka]

On 16/12/2016 14:45, John Marino wrote:
>>
> DragonFly has switched to Synth from poudriere as it's primary package 
> builder.  That means it builds entire repositories (25,000 packages) 
> biweekly on multiple servers.  It's highly used which serves as 
> continuous testing.  I also use it on FreeBSD to test updates to 
> ports. In fact, anyone that updates ports should use either poudriere 
> testport or synth test.  (Based on evidence, it's clear that some 
> people whom I won't name publicly never use the QA checks before 
> committing significant changes but that's getting sidetracked).
>
> The point is that these tools are in great shape and to imply 
> otherwise needs proof.  It's portmaster that's not receiving updates.

I think adding synth as the default builder in the FreeBSD Handbook and 
deprecating portmaster and portupgrade in the documentation would go a 
long way towards letting newcomers use the ports in the proper way 
(since they are not maintained anyway). They wouldn't need to be removed 
from ports for those hardcore users who are already used to using them. 
The current presence of those tools in the official Handbook makes them 
somehow the official way of upgrading ports in FreeBSD, even if it's the 
worst way of upgrading ports possible.
Grzegorz