Qpopper Port

[Kevin Oberman]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Montgomery-Smith, Stephen <
stephen at missouri.edu> wrote:

> On 01/15/2014 06:08 PM, Doug Hardie wrote:
> > I am going to have to give up maintaining qpopper.  Not because I don't
> have the interest or time, but because I simply cannot update any port.
>  The old port system may have had issues, but it worked!!!  The new one
> does not.  I am completely unable to upgrade or install any ports on a 9.1
> or higher system.  I have a number of those in production and will have to
> now resort to obtaining ports from the original sources and making them
> work on my systems.  Its a colossal pain in the *&^*&^.
>
> Call me old fashioned.  But I am still using FreeBSD-8 with the old
> ports system.  I also never got into the idea of using portmaster or any
> of those fancy tools, and still use pkg_version and pkg_delete and "cd
> /usr/ports/xxx/yyy && make install clean" to maintain my ports.
>
> I did install FreeBSD-10 on one computer recently, but I am experiencing
> the same problems with the ports I am maintaining - I cannot build many
> of them because dependent ports are breaking.
>
> Also, I get periodic emails from pkg-fallout at FreeBSD.org explaining how
> one or other of my ports don't build properly.  Some of the error
> messages are clearly problems with switching from gcc to clang, and are
> easily fixed.  But some of the other problems seem to be problems with
> FreeBSD-10 itself (especially /usr/bin/ld), or problems with pkgng.
>
> I do hope EOL for FreeBSD-8 is still some length of time away.  If I had
> to upgrade today, it would create difficulties for me.
>
>
I should point out that 9 still defaults to the old package system. 10.0
defaults to pkgng AND defaults to building ports with clang. While I have
not had any big issues for a while, you can go to 9 which will have neither
pkgng nor clang by default.

That said, but I am now running 10.0-RC5 and using both clang and pkgng and
have hit no significant issues. The ports I maintain are fairly simple and
converting to use the new systems was not a significant issue. I did have
to retire some tools had written that worked with the old pkg database. I
may re-do some to use the new database, but I have not bother, yet, and pkg
info does a pretty good job of meeting my needs.

I would have really liked to see both pkgng and staging have more time to
settle in before they became standard, but it seems like they are working
pretty well by now and I see them becoming much better. With the added
capabilities in the basic structure of pkgng,ther is hte potential to do
some really cool things that will make port maintenance much easier and
would simply not have been possible with the old system.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com