[RFC] Why FreeBSD ports should have branches by OS version

[Mark Linimon]

On Tue, Jun 27, 2017 at 09:24:31AM -0400, scratch65535 at att.net wrote:
> The number of ports to build a server-of-all-work is not large.

Now the problem is getting people to agree on exactly what that
subset is.

If there is interest, I can provide the examples and code I use
whenever I start up a new machine here at the house, e.g. powerpc64,
sparc64, etc.  And we'll see how close to agreement people can get.

(Yes, I'm quite skeptical.)

> Unnecessarily complex and a source of uncontrolled errors, yes,

One person's "unnecessary" is another person's "necessary".

> Specialist workstations such as sound/video editing?  Maybe.

You'll immediately go from a few hundred ports to a few thousand ports.

No one has ever done the work on "most minimal set of dependencies"
in the ports tree -- and that's because it's hard work.  Add to that
the fact that the technology has never supported partial checkouts
and it complicates things.

tl;dr: I do have long-time experience building subsets of the ports
tree and in my experience it's harder than people think, once you
get beyond a few dozen targets.

mcl