sysutils/cfs

Tony Mc afmcc at btinternet.com
Tue Sep 6 08:26:37 UTC 2011


On Mon, 5 Sep 2011 21:02:14 +0300
Kostik Belousov <kostikbel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Second, I personally consider the crusade to remove old but compiling
> and working (*) ports as a damage both to the project functionality
> and to the project reputation.

I find this whole "discussion" rather strange.  You use the highly
loaded term "crusade" and someone else refers to "drive by ports
shootings" and yet you claim it is the FreeBSD ports developers who are
being immature and unprofessional. 

I am a happy user of FreeBSD and have been for years.  I currently
have 1341 ports installed.  From time to time that brings difficulties,
but I know from experience that they will be resolved pretty quickly. I
follow the ports mailing list and read /usr/ports/UPDATING. If I am
using a port that is no longer being maintained and is known to have
vulnerabilities or potentially data-destroying bugs, I would much
prefer to know about that and, if necessary, move to another port that
provides equivalent functionality, even if that means I have to learn
another set of options, configurations etc.  I do not want abandoned
and broken software on my computer so having them removed from ports
(or put into the attic) seems to me exactly right - it pushes me
to learn some other program that will do the same thing more securely or
more correctly.  How can that be a bad thing?  The irresponsible thing
surely would be to leave everything in ports and wonder why FreeBSD got
a reputation for "supporting" broken or vulnerable software.  I use
FreeBSD because it is so stable and does what I need it to do.
Paradoxically, that stability requires constant change.

Of course I understand the concern about release users who might be
faced with a surprise when they upgrade.  But for such users I guess
upgrading is a big deal anyway and they would presumably research the
impact of the move before jumping to a newer version.

I suppose, for what it's worth, I just wanted to offer a different point
of view from the rather negative posts I've read recently.  I see the
work being done to clean up the ports tree as necessary in the short
term and very beneficial in the longer term.

Best,
Tony




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