"make index" on 4.10-STABLE

[Mark Linimon]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 11:40:13AM -0400, Tuc at T-B-O-H.NET wrote:
> I went back to the EOL branch, got the devel/make, installed it.
> Went back to the current state, and still had the issue.

I vaguely recall that right as we tagged the tree as EOL, one of the ports
changed underneath us and broke INDEX.  We _thought_ we slid the tag on
the fixed port to fix the INDEX build, but from your experience it sounds
like we didn't.

The last INDEX build for 4.X in the uploaded package directory is
ftp://ftp4.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4-stable/INDEX.
This dates from 02/06/07; the cvsdone file on pointyhat indicates that
the last CVS checkout was Fri Feb  2 18:49:49 UTC 2007, so this would
be believable.  It looks like the tag was laid down sometime between
2007/01/28 21:55:55 and 2007/01/29 04:03:34, based on commits to
devel/Makefile.  (That's as much research as I want to do :-) )  We no
longer have the ports tree that it was built from on pointyhat, so I
can't tell you if the cvsdone reflects the tag date or the later date.

I don't know if that INDEX file will be of use to you.

> I'll probably just end up running into this more as I go down the line.

Absolutely.  At this point, unless the above INDEX file works for you,
you are probably throwing good time after bad.

> I guess I need to create a bunch of boot CDs, take my server down for
> a while, and see if it'll run later versions of FreeBSD.

That's your best choice.

> I know on a few other computers I have I can't go past 5.3 without it
> breaking.

Please check them out with 6.2 or 6-STABLE and if they still don't work
and there are not yet PRs filed against 6 for those machines, please do so.

4.X served us well for a long time, but it was taking more and more
committer and maintainer time to keep it going; time that we (portmgr)
wanted to redirect to fixing problems with 6.2 and releases going forwards,
so that it could be a true superset of 4.  We did spend a year telling
people that we were closing the books on 4.

I know this won't make you or anyone else happy, but I do still believe
that if we had not shut the door at some point, we would still be supporting
4 years from now, and there's just simply not enough volunteer hours to
supporting 4 (!) major source releases on the ports tree, which is where
we were.  With the upcoming 7.0 release, we're going to be back in that
mode again, which is a shame (but at least the differences between 5, 6,
and 7 are far less than the difference between 4 and 5, and 5 is rapidly
approaching its own EOL.)  If we had not dropped 4, we would have been
supporting _5_ major source releases.  We would not have succeeded.

In any case, what's done is done, and we can't go backwards, only
forwards, from this point.

mcl