Thank you (for making the ports less boring).

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

On 09/13/2011 04:10 AM, Michal Varga wrote:
>
> And if it wasn't Gabor's commit that again brought my OS down to
> unusable level, it would be the one next week, or if we are lucky, two
> to three weeks from now (but that would be probably this year's record).
> Because the current procedures in place not only encourage these kinds
> of mistakes, they downright call for them. Because there are no
> procedures whatsoever. Not in the ecosystem-wide sense. Not the ones
> that are crucial to make the OS actually work as a whole. But hey, I'm
> not going to reiterate all that over again. It's been said.

Hi Michal,

I see where you are coming from.  I just recently became a ports 
committer.  Before, when I would submit ports, there were certain 
mistake consistently made by the committers.  Now that I am a committer, 
I can see how the tools used by the committers would lead to these 
consistent mistakes.

In particular, checking which ports depend on a port just updated is a 
particularly nasty thing to do.  I get the impression that each 
committer has his own special way of doing this.  For example, I have 
personally found that a simple grep won't work, because "grep xxx 
/usr/ports/*/Makefile*" just creates a line too long for the shell to 
handle.  I use a shell construction involving "find" but I wonder how 
others do the same thing.

My day job is taking a lot of my time right now.  But when things start 
to calm down, I'll start thinking about changes to the ecosystem of 
FreeBSD ports committing, and creating a set of more unified tools for 
the other ports committers to look at.

Finally, I did notice that since the overheated conversation of a few 
weeks ago, that a couple of people who wanted to update ports did 
contact me first.  This is because I maintain ports that depend on their 
proposed update.  So maybe your complaints are being heard, at least on 
one level.

Best regards,
Stephen