portmaster, portupgrade, etc

[Mike Clarke]

On Wednesday 04 Oct 2017 16:39:25 Ernie Luzar wrote:
> Here's my take on that.
> 
> The future direction has already been decided by the FreeBSD leaders 2 
> years ago with their development of a better pkg system.
> 
> The package system with flavors will cover 90% of the user community
> needs. The remaining user's requirements are edge cases. Tools like 
> portmaster and portupgrad and even the native ports system usage on 
> personal machines will fad away. The ports system will mature into the 
> development system in the path to get things into the package system.

Well I suppose I fall into the remaining 10% of the user community so here's my two cents 
worth.

I rely almost entirely on installing binary packages but I need to run php71 for compatibility 
with a website I maintain. I also need phpMyAdmin but need to build this from ports because 
the currently available package is built against php56. Using poudriere for this one task would 
be equivalent to using a steamroller to crack a peanut. Building phpMyAdmin from ports is no 
great problem for me and perhaps future development of pkg might avoid the need to build 
my own version but I'd hope that documented methods will continue to exist for users with 
this type of need.

-- 
Mike Clarke