Can't build ports on older FreeBSD machine

[Miguel Mendez]

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005 20:37:43 -0600
Brett Glass <brett at lariat.org> wrote:

> You may not, but users of FreeBSD do. At the very least,
> ports should be tagged as to the versions of the OS
> with which they will work, and it should be possible
> to retrieve the most recent version of the port that
> works with the version of the OS you are running.

Brett, if you want something to happen do something about it. You seem
to spend a incredible amount of time and energy telling others how
FreeBSD should be, yet you don't want to put up.

> Having users update in the standard (and prescribed)
> way and finding out that a major function (the entire
> ports system) is no longer working is certainly not
> something one would expect from professionally crafted
> software.

The handbook clearly states that current ports are only supported on 
-CURRENT and -STABLE. You might be lucky and get the ports to work on
older releases. The OpenBSD people do the same, btw. Except if you try
to use the current ports on a release they will sure fail to build. As
someone who does ports work I can tell you that supporting RELENG_4 and
RELENG_5 is enough work already. What you're asking for is not
reasonable for a volunteer driven project.

> Note that under Linux, the maintainers of distributions
> do exactly this. However, FreeBSD is essentially its own
> "distro," so the job of doing this falls to the FreeBSD
> developers and the maintainers of the ports. If it is
> not done, FreeBSD users will enjoy an inferior experience
> to the one they get with Linux or even Windows.

The situation is very different. Linux distros are a kernel + packages,
because the concept of a base system doesn't exist in the Linux world.
And people who run production Linux boxes are very careful about
updating critical parts of the system like glibc and friends. You
should take a look at e.g. RHEL and you'll see that they are quite
conservative too and only support very specific versions of software
packages.

Windows doesn't even play in the same league, why mention it?

As I've said, show the rest of us that you care enough about this and
do something about it. Else it sounds like you're just enjoying the
free ride and expect others to do all the work for you.

Cheers,
-- 
Miguel Mendez <flynn at energyhq.es.eu.org>
http://www.energyhq.es.eu.org
PGP Key: 0xDC8514F1

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