Ports completely and permanently hosed

[Lars Eighner]

On Thu, 6 Aug 2009, Doug Barton wrote:

> Lars Eighner wrote:
>
>> Believe me, if I can get back to my printer, camera, and mp3 player
>> all working (which last occurred about 6.2 or so) I'll never upgrade
>> again.  Of course it is kind of lonely when your release is orphaned,
>> which happens in the blink of an eye, but if the kernel supports all the
>> hardware, I'm pretty sure I can install any apps that I suddenly decide I
>> have to have myself.
>
> I'm not saying this to be snarky, but you might seriously consider
> trying another open source operating system to see if it meets your
> needs better.

It's has been about 10 years since I tried some flavor of Linux.  At that
time it was pretty much et up with GUI-itis.  Now I do see by the stuff that
gets spilled over that the GNU command-line stuff is getting a little
better, and in fact some of the native BSD utilities have been replaced by
them.  Anyway, if I install something and it boots to a GUI without asking,
it is to the ash-heap with it (or in the case of OS2 back in the box with a
sharp demand for a refund).

It seems to me I tried a couple of other BSD flavors and the deciding factor
was that the console keyboard was so easy to edit.  It was like a dream
compared to the others.

> There is a reason that there are so many choices out
> there nowadays, different people have different needs. For all the
> strides we've made in the "desktop/end user" areas in the 15 years
> I've been a FreeBSD user it is still, primarily, a server system;
> especially when compared to other systems like Ubuntu that are focused
> on the end user.

So people who run servers just don't expect that ports will be maintained so
that they can be managed by port management applications?  Maybe they don't
care.  Actually the server stuff does tend to work real well.

> You're clearly very frustrated, and I'm not going to judge whether
> your frustration is justified or not. But before you expend a lot more
> energy railing about the sad state FreeBSD is in you might want to put
> that energy in a more productive direction.

-- 
Lars Eighner
http://www.larseighner.com/index.html
8800 N IH35 APT 1191 AUSTIN TX 78753-5266