duration of the ports freeze

[Aryeh M. Friedman]

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Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, 1 Dec 2007, Aryeh M. Friedman wrote:
>
>> Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
>>> Aryeh M. Friedman wrote:
>>>
>>> For some reason, people contributing to this mailing list are
>>> getting frustrated because some of the applications are now
>>> getting to be about a month old.  But why should we expect to
>>> have the latest and greatest in version number of application?
>>> It is because this is what we usually have, and so a periodic
>>> hiccup is out of the ordinary and so frustrates us.
>>>
>>> But suppose you are running Red Hat Linux instead.  Do you also
>>> get the latest and greatest in this super timely manner?  (To
>>> be honest this is not a rhetorical question, but my guess is
>>> "no.")
>>>
>>> In fact, who feels this frustration.  Is it the ordinary user?
>>> Or is it us port maintainers who wish they could get their more
>>> recent PR's accepted?
>>>
>>> Surely this frustration is felt by us because we have
>>> information that things could be a little more up to date.  But
>>> if we weren't in the know, then we wouldn't be so upset.
>>
>> I am not suggesting we do a major overhaul before ports are
>> unfrozen... what I am suggesting is there is always room for
>> improvement and the frustrations voiced should be looked as an
>> opportunity to improve it instead of us (the complainers) crying
>> in our milk.
>
> I feel that your deflection of the points I made was a little
> unfair. My question is - why exactly is there a frustration?  Is it
>  because the FreeBSD community have somehow set expectations to be
> "totally up to date" a little too high?  Are we simply expecting
> more from FreeBSD than we get from Linux distributions or MS,
> simply because the average user has tremendous knowledge and
> insight into the internal development process?
>
> Remember, I'm just an average user, just like you.  I have no
> special axe to grind in defending FreeBSD.
>

Even though this is best answered in a more systematic way (an
"official" review of the entire problem set) here are my reasons for
being frustrated:

1. There as has been some work that I am aware on ports I use that has
not bean released during the freeze for various reasons (such as miro
and qemu patchs [enable the use of physical drives and run vista
without crashing]).   None of them are pressing enough for me to
bypass the ports system because everytime you do so you complicate
upgrading (have fun keeping track of what you installed from ports and
what came from vendor tar's)

2. As a developer I have 3 ports I would like to release ;-)


- --
Aryeh M. Friedman
FloSoft Systems
Developer, not business, friendly
http://www.flosoft-systems.com
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