why are theynot updated WAS Re: samba 3.0, FreeBSD 5.1

[Kris Kennaway]

On Sat, Nov 01, 2003 at 03:34:30PM -0500, SWIT wrote:

> newbie question.
> why isn't the ports updated ? Seems alot of times the ports is outdated by a
> version  or more.
> I mean if everyone is always saying its in the ports should they not be
> better upkeeped ?

1) FreeBSD is a volunteer project, sometimes the volunteer maintainers
don't have time to immediately drop their day job or whatever else
they're doing and rush out a port update 5 minutes after the new
version is released

2) Sometimes the maintainer is unaware of the update until someone
tells him.

3) Some ports are unmaintained, which means they don't get updated
unless someone submits one.

4) Sometimes the maintainer chooses not to update the port
immediately, e.g. because it is a major update and they want to test
its stability, or because it's known to have bugs, etc.

Putting this together, if you find outdated software in the ports
collection, send mail to the maintainer.  Even better, develop a patch
to update the port yourself (see the Porter's Hanbdook) and send that
to the maintainer to make their job easier.  For unmaintained ports
(MAINTAINER=ports at FreeBSD.org) you should submit the update using
send-pr(1).

> Also why is such an old version of perl 5.003 still in the freebsd base when
> 5.8 is out ?

Because 5.8 is not backwards-compatible with 5.00503, and updating the
base system version would break a lot of scripts used on installed
FreeBSD machines.  You can trivially install perl 5.8 from the ports
collection if you want to use it.

Kris
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