BSDstats Statistics for Sept, 2007 ... 12 769 Hosts Reported In

[Miguel Lopes Santos Ramos]

> From scrappy at freebsd.org  Wed Oct 31 00:44:12 2007
>
> >> From: "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy at freebsd.org>
> > [...]
> >> Actually, so far this month, they've gone up 0.3% (and its only middle of
> >> month) ... it does fluctuate from month to month ...
> >>
> >
> > Just out of curiosity, on what criteria do you clean up your list? Maybe
> > you're cleaning it up too often, no?
>
> Clean up our list?

Well, since the numbers go down I assumed you have some periodic cleanup of the
list of hosts reporting...
If you're showing only the number of hosts reported on a given month, it's the
same as a monthly cleanup.
Since hosts report monthly, wouldn't it be better to report the number of hosts
which reported in the last two or three months? Otherwise, if they fail to
report for some conjunctural reason, say due to maintenance, the numbers
will decrease falsely.

[...]
> There are actually other ports that are interactive in nature, and more often 
> then bsdstats ... install postfix sometime, and then upgrade it?  Every time 
> you upgrade it, it will ask you if you want to enable it ...

That's nasty...
Looks like I was lucky when I chose to go with sendmail.

> > When we, users, see a port changing, we do not know if it is only the install
> > which changed or the program behaviour which changed.
> > Certainly the install has changed behaviour, and that is troublesome for
> > portupgrades done in batch.
>
> Why?  There has only been one time where a change should have affected 
> portupgrade, and that was when we added the /etc/rc.conf interactive ... being 
> that, it *should* be totally transparent ...
>
[...]
> There are only two times it should *ever* have prompted ppl ... on initial 
> *manual* install, and, if they installed before the /etc/rc.conf changes, on a 
> portupgrade after that ... beyond that, it should be more transparent then 
> installing postfix ...
>
> If you do find a condition where you are being 'held up' on a portupgrade, do 
> please let me know, as it shouldn't happen ...

I'm sorry. It really must have been my memory of the early days of bsdstats, in
which it changed a bit frequently and then the rc.conf changes. Memory is often unfair.

Anyway, I just portupgraded bsdstats and it asked... Well, you see, I keep all
my settings in rc.conf.local, because nobody is supposed to change that
automatically, and this way I can keep rc.conf.local versioned on my svn
repository for configuration files... So, I usually keep rc.conf clean.
The pkg-install asks simply because the line is not on rc.conf.

Well... there isn't a one-size-fits-all, I understand. There's lots of other
stuff which makes portupgrades less batchable, the yes/no thing is not the only
one and it's a problem which I can easily go around, now that I know the
behaviour to expect. Worse problems for portupgrades are managing WITH_ options
for all ports... It's easier in gentoo (also has downsides...)

Thank you for looking through my perspective. I wish people were so attentive on the
other higher volume mailing lists.
There's at least one FreeBSD missing from your list, Gentoo/FreeBSD.
I'll try to get more people reporting. Only 10 in Portugal? What a shame... 2
are mine... I know more FreeBSD hosts than that...

Greetings,

Miguel Ramos