ports structure and improvement suggestions

[Sideris Michael]

On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 02:14:02PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 10:23:26PM +0200, Pav Lucistnik wrote:
> > Sideris Michael p??e v po 08. 05. 2006 v 23:09 +0300:
> > 
> > > Also, it would be nice to include tools like portupgrade, not
> > > portupgrade, in the base system. 
> > 
> > Yes, it would be nice.  You're going to write it?  It must be in shell
> > or in C.  Expecting patches.
> > 
> 	... .
> > 
> > The conclusion is: the code will not write by itself.
> > 
> > Nice.
> > 
> > It should not be necessary once we have OPTIONS everywhere, but, what
> > about a script that would emulate Gentoo's emerge -pv ? That would rock.
> > 
> 
> 	This is likely to start a flame war, or at least a spit-ball 
> 	fight.  I hope not....  Some months ago after using RedHat's 
> 	update stuff, a few people seemed a bit upset at my enthusiasm.
> 	Since then RH got greedy and stopped their free or cheapware
> 	approach  and I eventually found the next best altrnative to
> 	FBSD: Ubuntu.  Among their ``idiotware'' apps is a GUI front end
> 	to their apt-get  stuff.  In 11 months of use, I've managened to
> 	keep 2 Ubuntu systems current with a few mouseclicks a month.
> 
> 	Nutshell, is there a way of using this approach?  If not,
> 	is there a way of perl- or /bin/sh- or /bin/ch- bundling 
> 	portupgrade  with pkgdb, and other upgrade programs to get
> 	something more rational working?  Most of the times that 
> 	portupgrade screws up, it is due to a build failure.  Sometimes 
> 	it's easy to figure out why the build failed; when it is a 
> 	./configure snafu, it's always hours of time backtracing.
> 	Time N failed builds.  ...Too much.  

The problems here are really two. Decide a standard way for configuring ports and
include in the base system a tool that will upgrade the installed ports. Both of 
them are easy to achieve. Having in mind always that there are people in the mood
to improve things. Bored and irresponsible people should be vanished in my opinion
cause they are a cancer for a project like FreeBSD. And it is really sad to hear 
that the port maintainers are bored to modify the Makefiles. And it even more awful
to hear that even if the current Makefiles are modified, there is no way to ensure
this for future ports. Unacceptable.