opinions on porting software in alpha state?

[Florent Thoumie]

On Sun, 2006-03-05 at 22:01 -0600, Mark Linimon wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 04:44:46AM +0100, Jean-Yves Lefort wrote:
> > On Mon, 6 Mar 2006 01:22:05 +0300
> > Dmitry Marakasov <amdmi3 at mail.ru> wrote:
> > 
> > > I've successfully ported some software products, but now I doubt
> > > if I should actually submit these ports, because these programs are
> > > in alpha state. They are usable, yes, but as it may be expected
> > > from alphas they are quite buggy, and some functions don't work.
> > 
> > What's the difference with the other software we have in ports?
> 
> There are two theories of what should be in ports: 1) only things that
> are known well-working and useful; 2) anything that someone might find
> useful somehow, somewhere.
> 
> There is never going to be consensus on what the model is.  (My conclusion
> is based on the last N times this topic was discussed).
> 
> I think it is fair that if something is really rough, that the user ought
> to be warned somehow, so that an informed decision about whether to install
> it can be made.  Users "expect" the ports to work -- that part I'm not
> inclined to argue about, I'll just assert it.
> 
> So if it's something rough, either it should be in pkg-message, or if it
> is known not to work yet, set an IGNORE message and let the user override
> that if they choose.
> 
> (From past conversations you will be able to deduce that I lean towards
> theory 1, but that I no longer believe it is possible to either reach a
> consensus or force a policy on this.)

NetBSD has pkgsrc-wip, I think eik and clement used to work on some
external project like this one (hosted on sourceforge). Maybe if there
were an official statement about this (and more people working on it),
we could have alpha-quality software/ports there and integrate them
later in the ports collection.

Additionally, some magical tool to merge ports-wip with ports (maybe
marcuscom's script) would be more than useful.

-- 
Florent Thoumie
flz at FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD Committer