6.2 Ports Work Well

[Jason C. Wells]

I would like to thank the ports team for a good job with the RELEASE_6_2 
ports tree.  I was able to compile all of KDE and all of Gnome with 
minimal fuss.  The last time I built this stuff I had problems with a 
variety of dependency issues.

I did have a slight bit of fuss building packages recursively.  The key 
difficulty was that the some builds would detect installed libraries and 
complete successfully. (as they should)  The build of several package 
tarballs would fail because a certain file in the packing list wasn't 
found.  I am pretty sure this was because the installed port wasn't the 
same version as the one in the ports tree.  After the first couple of 
these errors I did an unconditional deinstall of the ports "world" (my 
build machine was pretty crufty anyway, having much leftover stuff from 
4X days even) and was able to build gnome and KDE and all tarballs 
without complaint.  That's a pretty significant accomplishment from 
where I sit.  Thanks!

Portupgrade and friends are able to do a monumental task with some 
sensibility and grace.  I can imagine how hard it is to get a build done 
on a chunk of software as large as say Windows done when everyone is 
working for the same organization, using the same tools, languages, 
compilers and so forth.  I have friends up here who vanish when it's 
build time in Redmond.

That the ports crew pulls all the diversity of open source together in a 
fairly well integrated system is commendable.

Later,
Jason C. Wells