The future of portmaster

[Kevin Oberman]

On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 7:15 AM, Anton Shterenlikht <mexas at bris.ac.uk>
wrote:

> >From adamw at adamw.org Tue May 30 15:03:31 2017
> >
> >The ports tree continues to evolve. Major new features are planned and in
> the process of being implemented. These changes will break all the
> port-building tools.
>
> oy vei
>
> >poudriere and synth are actively developed, so they will quickly support
> the new changes. portmaster and portupgrade are no longer being actively
> developed, so it is anticipated that they will stop working until somebody
> fixes them (if at all).
>
> I last used poudriere a couple years back.
> It is much more involved than portmaster
> (obviously, these 2 tools are not doing the same job)
>
> >So no, portmaster isn't going away. But, there's no guarantee that it
> will keep working. We strongly, strongly advise everyone to use poudriere
> or synth to build their ports, and then plain old "pkg upgrade" to handle
> updates.
>
> because my experience of poudriere was mixed,
> I haven't used it at all on amd64.
> pkg is great. And when occasionally I need
> non-default options I use portmaster.
>
> >
> >The vast majority of problems reported on this mailing list exist only in
> portmaster/portupgrade, because they do not do clean builds. At this point,
> portmaster should only be used by people with enough ports development
> experience to understand and mitigate conflicts and various build errors.
>
> I agree that a dirty environement is mostly
> the source of bad portmaster builds.
>
> However, to create the whole poudriere enviroment
> to build a port a week, or maybe a month, seems
> like an overkill.
>
> Yes, I know, it's a volunteer project, things
> evolve, unless somebody steps in...
>
> If my recollection of poudriere is correct,
> I'll need a separate ports tree?
> And if I only need to build a single port
> with custom settings, I'll have to start
> every time from scratch?
> And if I want to use this single port with
> default settings with my other ports, I need
> to make sure the 2 port trees are in sync.
>
> Sorry if I don't do poudeire justice, it's been a while...
>
> Anton
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I really suggest that you look at synth. It also builds in a clean
environment and provides all of the advantages of poudeire for use in a
single-system (or multiple identical systems) case. No jails to set up. It
builds a local pkg repository and you then use pkg on everything. I don't
consider it a replacement for portmaster, but in most environments it does
the same job and, since it builds in a clean environment, it avoids many of
the issues with other tools. It is also very well documented, so it is not
too hard to understand setup and use.
--
Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com
PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683