Ports Improvements

[Kris Kennaway]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2004 at 04:16:43PM -0700, Loren M. Lang wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm curious if there is any major work being done in developing the
> ports infrastructure right now or if it is mostly just minor features or
> bug fixes that are being added.  The main reason I'm asking is that
> there are several major improvements, IMHO, that gentoo's portage has
> over the bsds' ports system that I would like to see included.  The
> biggest thing is the USE flags.  One of the biggest annoyances I have
> with major upgrades using portupgrade is when I leave it upgrading for a
> day and come home to find it sitting at the mplayer-skins screen asking
> what skins I want to install and that it spent less then an hour doing
> any work upgrading.

BATCH

> I really don't care much about skins, the default
> is fine, but instead is wasted nearly a whole day when I wasn't using
> the system.  Not to mention, I installed this port before and selected
> all since I have plenty of hard drive space, why couldn't it at least
> remember my last configuration if not default to something.

OPTIONS

> USE flags would also eliminate the need for ports like exim-ldap.

No, because packages still need to be built with non-default options.

> Another improvement of portage is that any port can hold multiple
> ebuilds, instead of a single makefile so both mozilla and mozilla-devel
> would be in the same directory as two different ebuilds.  In fact, I
> think gentoo has at least 5 of the latest ebuilds in the mozilla
> directory.  This makes it easier to choice an older version if the
> latest has some bugs not worked out yet.

FreeBSD just does it differently.  There's no reason you can't have an
old version of the port in another directory, and in fact this is
often done.

> Yesterday I just ran across
> portaudit and tried it out.  I found that the mozilla-devel build I have
> has some security vulnerabilities in it, which is understandable for a
> -devel version.  I used -devel a few months back when the mozilla port
> was too old for my purposes, but no longer the case.  So then I tried to
> build mozilla instead only to find it had it's own security
> vulnerabilities.  I tried updating the ports tree, but both ports still
> had problems.  At least on gentoo I would of had five choices.

Non sequitur.  Whether multiple port are in the same directory or not
has no impact on whether they'll have security vulnerabilities fixed.
That's up to the developers of the code, and FreeBSD users and port
maintainers to submit the fixes they provide.

> The last feature I would like to see in ports is the ability to hold
> back certain ports or force them to always use packages.  lang/ezm3 and
> editors/openoffice-1.1 almost always fail compiling at some point with
> cc1 being killed for eating too much memory.  I prefer to always build
> from ports even when the latest package exists minus these two ports.
> Also, I might just prefer to keep kde where it is since it takes so long
> to build and sometimes they update the port several times in a short
> period of time.

portupgrade lets you do this.

Kris
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20041024/81c5b173/attachment.bin