HEADS UP: ports/ and 10.0-CURRENT

[Garrett Cooper]

On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 9:56 PM, Kevin Oberman <kob6558 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 9:03 PM, Ade Lovett <ade at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> With the advent of the conversion of HEAD to 10.0-CURRENT and, as to be
>> expected, ports/ is going to be essentially unusable for a while.
>>
>> The issue stems from configure scripts (to choose something completely
>> at random) assuming that FreeBSD would never jump to a double-digit
>> major version number, and as such, various regexps for "freebsd1*" (ie:
>> FreeBSD 1.1.x) are now matching "freebsd10".
>>
>> This is going to be some fairly fundamental breakage.
>>
>> However, until such time as 9.0-RELEASE is completely out of the door,
>> with autotools hat on, I will _not_ be committing any changes to
>> infrastructural ports to "fix" this.
>>
>> That is to say, until 9.0-R happens, and for some considerable period
>> afterwards, ya'll can pretty much expect ports/ to be non-functional on
>> HEAD.  PRs mentioning this will be gleefully closed referencing this
>> message.
>
> aDe,
>
> Could an entry to this effect be added to UPDATING (with a matching
> entry when ports/ is "unbroken").

Being a pessimist, ports will never be fully unbroken unless all the
thousands of autotools based ports as fixed, due to unfortunately code
duplication. That being said, I think that a note in
/usr/ports/UPDATING as well as /usr/src/UPDATING is a VERY good idea.

> Anyone running CURRENT should be reading your message, but I'm a "belt
> and suspenders" type of
> guy on this sort of thing. Backing out of CURRENT and moving to
> 9-STABLE can be a REAL pain that
> will likely rapidly get worse as HEAD gets less and less frozen.

It's not the FreeBSD dev's fault. Unfortunately the autotools folks
were microoptimizing and didn't consider that the future would come
sooner than it actually did.

Thanks,
-Garrett