Implications of pkgng, was Re: Why Are You NOT Using FreeBSD ?

[Mel Flynn]

On 3-6-2012 9:58, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On 03/06/2012 02:21, Erich wrote:

>> I do not believe that much more would be needed. Of course, we have
>> then a huge number of versions. Would it matter? Give the ports tree
>> the major version number of the latest release. So, at the moment it
>> would be 10. Increment then the minor every hour if you want. Just
>> make sure that the ports tree can be downloaded for some time under
>> this version number.
> 
> What exactly is this supposed to solve?  Simply attaching a number to
> the ports tree won't do anything.  There is already a promise that the
> ports should work on all supported FreeBSD release branches.

There's one problem that can never practically be solved and one that
isn't being tested by maintainers because of Tinderbox.

The first is that very fast the possible number of combinations
introduced with options goes out of range of a human life time. This is
especially true for GUI components.
Other operating systems referenced here are no comparison, since they
simply do not provide those kinds of choices for 3rd party software.

The second issue is that Tinderbox processes each port stage separately,
starting with a clean system. This hides bugs that only come out when
the various stages are chained or when a ports management tool removes
and tries to reinstall a port in the dependency chain.
In a few cases there are hidden circular dependencies caused by runtime
loading.

Once the base system supports binary upgrades of packages through pkgng
it should solve a lot of issues that people have with production systems
now, though there are already people that are deploying custom built
binary packages to their production systems using a "wipe and reload"
approach.
-- 
Mel