general R4I on ports

[Donald Wilde]

Folks,

Not to start a flame war, but I've had a few issues in the ports tree,
as STABLE readers have no doubt seen.

This is a Request for Insights.

IMHO, it's a black hole to stay current with ports designed to utilize
GNU tools, especially documentation tools.

I realize that given the complexity and size of the ports tree,
eliminating GPL ports would cut out a huge swath of cool stuff,
especially considering the ongoing EOL crisis in our SW world.

I was looking at flex and bison, as examples. Flex is BSD-licensed,
but bison is not. Byacc, however, is Public Domain.

I would like to create an end-point system using FreeBSD that is
BSD-clean insofar as licensing is concerned. I know that I am not
alone in desiring this. We do have lots of Big GoshWhatta(tm)
Corporations using FreeBSD, and the cleaner we can make it the happier
their lawyers would be.

I do realize that I can determine the dependencies of ports before I
install them, and, because I am building a mule for pushing and
shoving and developing, I choose to install docs, which in most cases
kicks me into the black hole, but I'd like to offer a diffident
suggestion.

Could we initialize a /usr/ports/bsd tree, which would mirror
/usr/ports (as it is developed) with bsd/devel, bsd/lang, etc.?

I realize that there are far too few people smart and experienced
enough to be committers and maintainers, but it seems that if one is
familiar (much more than I am now) with the process and the individual
ports, making a BSD-clean port would be possible for you guys. First
by pruning things like non-BSD non-text documentation, etc, but then
getting more ambitious like re-writing for byacc instead of bison and
clang instead of g++. I know that Knuth used to do lots of cool docs
with his TeX and other ideas.

I'm not asking you to create a BSD world by magic wand, but maybe if
the hooks were there some would accept the challenge. Who knows, maybe
I'll get educated enough to have the courage to try it myself! <wink>

-- 
Don Wilde
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* What is the Internet of Things but a system *
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