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:
>
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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 ;-)
>
> But this agrees with my original assertion - that the frustration
> is from the port maintainers and originators, rather than the port
> users.

Actually item 1 is more important to me then item 2.
>
>
>
> What solution would you propose.  The only one I can think of is
> that we have a ports-stable and a ports-current.  But I can see
> many people not liking this idea.
>

An other solution (and one suggested by Huffman) is create a matrix of
what stuff has been tested against and on a port by port basis I can
set a tested vs. untested flag for what set of depenancies to use.
This is not much different then your idea just more fined grained.

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