Thank you (for making the ports less boring).

[Oliver Fromme]

Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
 > 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.

cd /usr/ports
echo */*/Makefile* | xargs grep xxx

If your shell is zsh, you can also use zargs (see the man
page for details):

zargs */*/Makefile* -- grep xxx

On the topic of this thread:  I also use FreeBSD as desktop
OS on my workstations, both at home and at the office, for
about 15 years.  My impression is that the quality of the
ports collection improved during all that time, except for
a few specific incidents.

Of course it does sometimes happen that something doesn't
work.  That's a natural thing, given that there are more
than 20k ports and several hundred people are working on it
at the same time.  These things are usually fixed very
quickly.  Sometimes there's an obscure problem that doesn't
seem to happen to anybody else, so I have to debug and fix
it myself (followed by PR'ing the issue, of course), but
that's ok, too.  This is open source after all.

It should also be emphasized that old libraries should
always be saved when updating ports.  This would have saved
Michal from the gdbm problem.  portupgrade does that by
default (as does portup), while portmaster requires the -w
option to do that (which is unfavorable, in my opinion; it
should do that by default, too).

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing b. M.
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chen, HRB 125758,  Geschäftsführer: Maik Bachmann, Olaf Erb, Ralf Gebhart

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Python is executable pseudocode.  Perl is executable line noise.