starting off

[Rick C. Petty]

First of all, please use a more appropriate subject.  Most of us subscribe
to multiple mailing lists, so a subject like "starting off" makes no sense
for the questions you are asking.

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 11:34:55AM -0500, Chuck Robey wrote:
> 
> OK.  I need here to say that I'm more than a little bit astonished at how easily
> the jdk16 port built.  I haven't even tried to use the port for several years,

That's obvious, since jdk ports have been building just fine for _many_
years.  In fact port maintainers and our ports team have done a very good
job keeping ports working well.  I hope those people and others who maintain
the java ports don't take offense to your astonishment.

> and the last times I remember trying it, the port really needed great amounts of
> hand-holding to get it to work.  You might need to advertise the fact that it
> now just plain builds, perfectly, as if it had no bad history at all.

That is completely unnecessary.  Your comment sounds like an insult wrapped
inside a complement.  There are many people keeping FreeBSD ports up to
date and they are doing an excellent job.  Even back to jdk12, I hardly
recall having to do anything special...  things just worked.  This is what
I expect from FreeBSD and why I don't use other distros.  FreeBSD ports
often seem to work better than the ports themselves do.

> I wasn't aware of the eclipse-devel port, it's perfect for me, thanks.  The only
> stumbling block I found was in trying to find the name of the ant port
> (apache-ant didn't seem at all obvious to me).  You folks think that there's
> some problem with using ant, or Ant, anything more obvious?

The name of the project is "Apache Ant".  The distfiles are apache-ant.
The unpacked tarball goes into apache-ant.  The port maintainer correctly
labelled the port.

To the FreeBSD Java team:  Thank you for your efforts!  Your work has
allowed me to use FreeBSD at work and as such, I am more efficient.

-- Rick C. Petty