Growing list of required(ish) ports

[Robert Simmons]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 1:11 AM, Kevin Oberman <rkoberman at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 8:34 PM, Kimmo Paasiala <kpaasial at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 6:19 AM, Robert Simmons <rsimmons0 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 10:45 PM, Bryan Drewery <bdrewery at freebsd.org>
>> > wrote:
>> >> On 4/7/2013 8:47 PM, Robert Simmons wrote:
>> >>> Are there plans to get the following ports moved into HEAD?
>> >>>
>> >>> 1) ports-mgmt/pkg
>> >>>
>> >>> 2) ports-mgmt/dialog4ports
>> >>>
>> >>> 3) ports-mgmt/portaudit
>> >>>
>> >>> 4) ports-mgmt/portmaster
>> >>>
>> >>> It seems to me like these belong in the base system.
>> >>
>> >> On the contrary, the idea is that more and more should come *out of
>> >> base* and into ports. Base is very static and stuck in time. By moving
>> >> these things into ports, you are able to get updates much simpler. No
>> >> need for an errata or security advisory or release. Just updating with
>> >> portmaster/pkg upgrade.
>> >
>> > I understand where you're coming from, but perhaps there needs to be
>> > movement in both directions.
>> >
>> > I may be way off the mark here, but I'd love to spark a discussion
>> > about this.  I think that in general things that are directly FreeBSD
>> > projects belong in base.  Examples would be pkgng, and making
>> > dialog4ports a switch in dialog(1).  Essentially, code that does not
>> > have an upstream should be in base.
>> >
>> > On the other hand, there are a number of things that I think should be
>> > pulled out of base.  Some already have ports, and others would need
>> > ports created.  Examples of things to pull out of base are OpenSSL,
>> > Heimdal, OpenSSH, PF, ntpd, ipfilter, bind, sendmail, and others.
>> > Code that is typically way behind the upstream project basically.
>> >
>> >>
>> >> portaudit is not needed with pkg, just use 'pkg audit'.
>> >
>> > I had missed that.  Thanks!
>> >
>> >>
>> >>>
>> >>> Also, is there a reason why dialog4ports's functionality wasn't added
>> >>> to dialog(1) as a switch?
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> Regards,
>> >> Bryan Drewery
>> >> bdrewery at freenode/EFNet
>> >>
>> > _______________________________________________
>>
>> I think Bryan already explained the reasons why pkg should not be in
>> base, it's an external tool that is not strictly required to get a bare
>>
>> bones FreeBSD system up and running. Including it in base you create
>> yet another maintainance burden and would slow down the development of
>> the ports/packages management tools.
>>
>> -Kimmo
>
>
> What people seem to miss is that putting tools into the base system
> strangles the tools. Look at the difficulty we have seen in updating
> openssl. perl was removed from base for exactly that reason. Once something
> is in base, it usually can only be updated  on major releases and even then
> it can be very complicated. That is a problem for any dynamically changing
> tool.
>
> I would love to see BIND removed from base, but most of the things  you
> listed really are hard to remove. I know that I don't want to try bringing
> up a new install of FreeBSD on a remote system without OpenSSH and that

OpenSSH is the only one that doesn't follow the same pattern.  It
seems that the port of it has been abandoned going on 2 years.  It is
lagging far far behind 9-stable which looks like DES bumped to 6.1 and
HEAD has been bumped to 6.2p1.

> pulls in openssl.  In the case of many tools, it really turns into a
> bikeshed. But i can see no reason to add any of the new packaging tools
> simply because it is critical that updates be possible far  more often than
> is possible for the base system.
> --
> R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
> E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com