rcs

Adrian Chadd adrian at freebsd.org
Tue Oct 8 18:58:56 UTC 2013


I think that's great. But, as we are increasingly finding, theres no stable
ports snapshot, so unless we as a project change how packages are managed,
there may not really be a stable, predictable version of things once
they're moved from base to a package. A number of users and companies like
that there is a very strict definition of base and that it wont change as
the ports tree changes.

Eg, you install 10.0 and get the rcs package from that. You then do an
install of 10.0 a yeat later and install rcs. If it comes from the
10-stable pkgng set, itll pick up the latest version, not the 10.0 version.
Thats the big ports vs base difference.

-adrian
 On Oct 8, 2013 11:20 AM, "Alfred Perlstein" <bright at mu.org> wrote:

> On 10/8/13 8:04 AM, sthaug at nethelp.no wrote:
>
>> I think the fact is that most direct users of RCS use it in a very
>>>> simple way, and
>>>> it works just fine for that.  with no real need for any updates or any
>>>> change.
>>>>
>>> With all due respect Julian, The more we discuss this more this really
>>> points to the problem that FreeBSD appears to be a challenge to install
>>> packages into such that a package moving out of base is such a big deal.
>>>
>>> Can we fix that instead?
>>>
>>> I mean, this change should really not be a big deal, but yet it is and
>>> this speaks to the core of FreeBSD utility.
>>>
>> Not commenting on RCS here, but on the concept of moving packages out
>> of the base:
>>
>> - For some of us, the attraction of FreeBSD is that it is a tightly
>> integrated system, and the base contains enough useful functionality
>> that we don't *have* to add a lot of packages.
>>
>> - Each package that is moved out of the base system means less useful
>> functionality in the base system - and for me: Less reason to use
>> FreeBSD instead of Linux.
>>
>> I absolutely see the problem of maintaining out-of-date packages in
>> the base system, and the desirability of making the base system less
>> reliant on GPL. I'm mostly troubled by the fact that there seems to
>> be a rather strong tendency the last few years of having steadily
>> less functionality in the base system - and I'm not at all convinced
>> that the right balance has been found here.
>>
>> This discussion is not new, and I don't expect to convince any new
>> persons...
>>
>>
>>  I'm sure other devs will disagree, but with ~15 years of FreeBSD
> experience and ~13 years as a dev, my very strong opinion is that this
> tightly coupled system is actually a boat anchor sinking us.
>
> Just because no one else does it a certain way, does not mean that a
> unique way of doing something is correct and/or sustainable.  Maybe in
> 1995, 1999, or 2005 even, but not today.  Especially in the context of
> add-on tools like rcs.
>
> What we need to discuss is lowering the bar to making custom installs.
>
> I personally find that installing FreeBSD is useless until I install
> "screen, zsh, vim-lite, git" why is that so manual for me?  Why can't I
> just register a package set somewhere so that all I have to type in is
> "alfred.perlstein.devel" into a box during the installer and I get all my
> packages by default?
>
> --
> Alfred Perlstein
>
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